I 







I 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

Shelf.....CL-73 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE PREACHER AND 
HIS PLACE 



THE rREACHER 
HIS PLACE 



THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURES ON PREACH- 
ING, DELIVERED AT YALE UNIVERSITY 
IN THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY, i8gs 



BY 



^ 



REV. DAVID H. GREER, D.D. 

RECTOR OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S CHURCH, NEW YORK CITY 




NEW YORK -.'7*7*-^ 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 




J3V4-*' 1 



Copyright, 1895, 
By Charles Scribner's Sons. 



2Sttttaitg Stress: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, LL S. A. 



PREFACE 



TN looking over the Lectures which are 
contained in this Volume, with a view 
to their publication, I was strongly tempted 
to recast them. Their style, as will be 
seen, is that of direct address, which for 
those who heard them was perhaps the 
most appropriate, but for those who may 
read them, it is not, to say the least, such 
as I should choose. For this reason, there- 
fore, I was disposed to change, not their 
substance, but their form. I soon found, 
however, that the one involved the other, 
and that it was not easy, if indeed 
possible, to change the phrasing of 
the thought without changing also the 
thought; and that was something which 
I felt I had no right to do ; neither had I 



2 PREFACE 

the desire to do it. The Lectures, there- 
fore, are printed just as they were deliv- 
ered, in the hope that if they were of 
any value to the hearer, they may prove 
to be not altogether valueless to the 
reader, in helping him to determine the 
distinctive place and work of the Chris- 
tian minister in the economy of Modern 
Life. 

DAVID H. GREER. 

St. Bartholomew's Day, 
August 24, 1895. 



CONTENTS 



Page 

The Preacher and the Past .... 7 

The Preacher and the Present ... 39 

The Preacher and his Message ... 71 

The Preacher and other Messages . 105 
The Preacher preparing his Message: 

General Preparation 137 

The Preacher preparing his Message: 

Special Preparation 169 

The Preacher and the Parish . . . 203 
The Preacher making the most of Him- 
self 237 






THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 

TN accepting the invitation with which I 
had been honored to deliver this course 
of lectures, I felt very keenly the embar- 
rassment of putting myself in the position 
of the last speaker upon a subject which 
had been already very fully traversed, and 
in regard to which it would not be easy 
for me ■ to say anything that had not been 
more ably and better said before. There 
was, however, this mitigating and reliev- 
ing circumstance : when the other lec- 
turers spoke and delivered themselves of 
their burden, I was not in the audience, 
and therefore did not hear them ; neither, 
although their deliverances have been pub- 
lished, have I had the privilege (except to 
a very limited extent) of reading them in 
print. While, therefore, I may repeat in 
part what has been already said, I shall be 
ignorant of it, and the ignorance will give 
me boldness, or at least freedom in my 



8 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

utterance, and will help to relieve the 
embarrassment which otherwise I might 
feel. 

But there was another embarrassment, 
proceeding, not from the sameness, but 
from the bigness of the subject. For it is 
a big subject. It is almost boundless in its 
bigness, and would be easier to treat if it 
were smaller. In my early schoolboy days 
it was, I remember, one of my appointed 
and somewhat dreaded duties to furnish an 
essay every week upon a topic of my own 
selection. In the attempt to discharge 
that constantly recurring and not welcome 
task, I soon came to the end of all think- 
able * topics, and did not know what topic 
to treat and write on next. Presently, 
however, I hit upon a device which seemed 
at the time both felicitous and fruit- 
ful. I tried to find a topic so generous 
and large that it might be continued from 
week to week without any fear of exhaust- 
ing it; and I can recall now with what 
lively satisfaction I coined the fruitful 
phrase, as then it seemed, and selected 
for my theme, " The World and its 
Contents." That lively satisfaction, how- 
ever, did not long live, and I soon dis- 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 9 

covered, what in other ways, and with 
increasing fulness of realization, I have 
been discovering ever since, and not always 
to my comfort, that it is " the narrow chim- 
ney which makes the best draught," and 
that to have a theme too big is tantamount 
almost to having no theme at all. 

Something like that is the feeling which 
I experience now. My theme is too big. 
There seems to be no end and no begin- 
ning to it. It is an all-out-of-doors theme, 
like " The World and its Contents," or the 
universe and its contents. For the work 
of the ministry touches and includes with- 
in its compass all sorts and conditions 
of things, in the heavens above, and the 
earth beneath, and the waters under the 
earth, and in the soul of man. It deals with 
things human ; it deals with things divine ; 
things physical, things metaphysical ; things 
natural, things supernatural ; mental, moral 
and spiritual. In at least the form of the 
speech, if not the speech itself, which Ruth 
addressed to Naomi, it says to all these 
tilings : " Where you go I go ; where you 
lodge I lodge ; your interests are my 
interests ; your work is my work ; your 
truth is my truth, and your God is my 



10 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

God." The subject, I say, is very big, 
and with the consciousness that I can start 
almost anywhere, and proceed in almost 
any direction, it is difficult to start and 
proceed. I must, however, start some- 
where, and perhaps I can do no better than 
to try to put myself in your place, young 
gentlemen, and start where you start, or 
where presently you will start, when you 
have taken your ordination vows and en- 
tered upon your work. And where, then, 
shall you start? And how, then, shall 
you start ? And what, then, shall you be ? 
Ministers of Jesus Christ going forth to 
preach to the world the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ, and to build up in the world the 
Kingdom of Jesus Christ, and to reconcile 
the world through Jesus Christ to God? 
Yes, that will be your work; that, I am 
sure, will be your ambition: and a great 
and noble work, and worthy ambition it is. 
But in the doing of that work, and in 
the fulfilling of that ambition, there is, 
or there will be, a limitation upon you, 
voluntarily imposed, to be sure, but still 
a limitation; namely, a theological limita- 
tion. You will be bound by forms of 
faith, and to those forms of faith — as the 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 11 

religious organization which equips and 
sends you forth has received them — you 
must be loyal and true. That, I say, is 
the way in which you will presently start, 
with the self-imposed limitation of a theo- 
logical subscription upon you. 

Let me, then, start as you start, and in 
this lecture consider what that limitation 
is ; what it means and implies ; and what, 
in my judgment, it does not mean and 
imply. That is a question which the 
Christian world to-day seems to be very 
seriously considering. How can the new 
knowledge which has been brought to light 
by the spirit of modern inquiry be recon- 
ciled with the old knowledge which is 
reflected or expressed in the early forms 
of faith ? Can it be reconciled at all ? Is 
any reconciliation possible ? Is the Chris- 
tian minister free to accept that new knowl- 
edge, or free even to consider it? Is he, 
with reference to it, an independent man ? 
Some persons maintain that he is not ; and 
that while the student of science is free, 
and the student of philosophy is free, the 
student of theology is not free, or not free 
at least when he has been ordained and 
become a Christian minister. Then, it is 



12 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

said, he is fettered and bound, and must 
teach, not what he thinks, but what the 
Church which has ordained him thinks. 
And that is true. But it is not, in my 
judgment, true in the way in which it is 
sometimes said to be true. In what sense, 
then, is it true, and in what sense is it not 
true? It is only right and proper that, 
standing as you do upon the threshold 
of the Christian ministry, you should con- 
sider and settle that question, and that 
before you go to preach the Gospel to the 
present, you should try to ascertain what 
your relation is to the past, and to what 
extent you are fettered and held in check 
by the past, and your freedom of utter- 
ance is impaired. That is the topic which 
I will ask you to consider in this lecture. 
The Preacher and the Past. Stated in 
other words, the topic or the question is 
this: "What is involved in a theological 
subscription? What does it mean, and 
what does it not mean ? " 

I remark in the first place, in attempting 
to answer that question, that theology as 
I apprehend it is not a stationary, but 
a progressive and constantly advancing 
science. It is different now in some re- 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 13 

spects from what it formerly was ; and it 
is not now in all respects what it will be 
hereafter. Truth itself, subjectively con- 
sidered, is of course a fixed and definite 
quantity. It is always one and the same. 
But the knowledge of truth is not. That 
is a variable quantity, and is at one time 
greater and more than at another time. 
And this applies to all truth and all knowl- 
edge ; whether it be the knowledge of the 
truth of God in nature, or whether it be 
the knowledge of the truth of God in 
Christ. And just as the knowledge of the 
truth concerning electricity, or heat, or 
light, or gravity, is greater now than it was, 
so is the knowledge of the truth concern- 
ing Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ Himself is 
of course the same ; and the truth that we 
find in Him now has been in Him always. 
It has been alwaj^s in Him, but not always 
found in Him. It has been always true, 
but not always known, or it has been 
known only in part, and as it will be here- 
after known only in part. For while there 
may come a time when we can say we 
know all the truth in things, there never 
will come a time when we can say we know 
all the truth in Him, who was before all 



14 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

things, by whom all things were made, 
and without whom was not anything made 
that was made. Life in Him is limitless. 
Truth in Him is boundless. We do not 
know it all ; we cannot know it all ; and 
when we say we do, or when we draw the 
line at the fourth or the sixteenth cen- 
tury, and say that the knowledge of Christ 
was then complete and final, with nothing 
more to be added, we are to that extent 
denying Christ, or denying the God in 
Christ ; and the faith which believes that 
any doctrinal statement has set Him fully 
forth, is faith in Christ as man. It may 
call itself evangelical; it may call itself 
catholic : it often does ; but it is neither. 
It is an implicit negation of the evan- 
gelical faith, and militates against that 
catholic creed of the Church which it seeks 
to uphold and maintain. That creed de- 
clares that Christ was more than man, was 
God ; and God, the Infinite, the Absolute, 
the Eternal, is always beyond the limit of 
human apprehension, is always more than 
the knowledge, be it ever so much, of man. 
When we say that something is boundless, 
we must not proceed to bound it. If we do, 
we deny what we affirm, and destroy what 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 15 

we build. And when we declare in one 
breath that Jesus Christ was God, or God 
manifest in the flesh, and then in the next 
declare that all that is in Him is known, 
we deny what we affirm, and destroy what 
we build, and declare that He was not 
God. 

We read of certain persons who in 
Christ's day tried to shut up the Kingdom 
of Heaven against those who were seeking 
to enter. The effort was not successful, 
nor will it ever be. The kingdom of man 
we may shut up; we may traverse it all 
and say, " It goes no further than this ; 
and that here is where it stops." But the 
Kingdom of God we cannot shut up, and 
just because it is the Kingdom of God. 
There are treasures in it which we never 
find ; and heights we never scale ; and 
depths we never fathom ; and regions we 
never explore. It is always open beyond 
us, and its gates we can never close. And 
if in Jesus Christ we see a King who 
is God, and in His truth a kingdom which 
is the Kingdom of God, we cannot say, 
" Thus far and no farther does it go." We 
cannot shut it up ; or if we do, we shut 
it up as a Kingdom of God, and make it 



16 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

something less. Because, therefore, we 
believe that Jesus Christ was God, Avith 
the Infinite in Him, we also believe that no 
doctrinal symbol of the Christian Church 
in the past is or can be the full expression 
of Him. It may be true as far as it goes, 
but it does not go far enough. It does 
not go as far as He goes. There is in 
Christ something more than what it sees 
and states. That something more in Him 
has been gradually coming out, with fuller 
and larger disclosure to the apprehension 
of man. We cannot shut it up, nor pre- 
vent it from coming out. Men have tried 
to prevent it, and time and again have 
said, " Now we know it all ; the form of 
Christian doctrine is now complete, final, 
there is nothing more to be added ; — there 
is nothing more to be said, and contro- 
versy is ended." But it was not ended ; 
and it is not ended yet. It has been going 
on ; it is going on, and it will hereafter go 
on. Nothing has stopped it ; nothing can 
stop it ; and more and more will the truth 
of God in Jesus Christ be apprehended 
by man. 

Let me not be misunderstood. So far as 
a creed or doctrine is a statement of fact, 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 17 

such, for instance, as the Apostles' Creed, it 
is of course final. Fact is fact, and always 
remains fact; and the Creed which ex- 
presses fact in connection with Jesus Christ, 
as the fact of His birth, for instance, or life, 
or death, or resurrection, is to that extent 
stationary. But the interpretation of the 
fact, or of the significance of the fact, that 
is not stationary. One age apprehends it 
in part, and another age apprehends it in 
part. The different apprehensions are not 
contradictory, but supplemental. Each age 
looks from its own point of view, and 
through the medium of its own atmosphere, 
and sees something new in Christ, — not 
something new in fact, but something new 
in the meaning and application of fact. It 
is vision as it were from a valley, with 
mountains steep and high, sloping up on 
either side towards the truth of God in 
Christ ; and it is only the one little section 
of the great and broad expanse imme- 
diately above that any one age can see, 
that any one man can see, or any one set 
of men. St. Paul looks up from the val- 
ley with clear and open eye, and the doc- 
trine of faith is passing. " By faith a man 
is justified without the deeds of the law." 
2 



18 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

St. James looks up from the valley with 
an eye equally clear, and the doctrine of 
works is passing. "By works a man is 
justified, and not by faith only." St. John 
at the close of the century, when Jerusa- 
lem has fallen, and the stroke of doom is 
impending over imperial Rome, — St. John 
looks up from the valley, and the doctrine 
of judgment is passing. 

So throughout all the subsequent his- 
tory of the Christian Church. The various 
observations which at times it has made of 
the truth of God in Christ we may and do 
accept; but not as the observation of all 
the truth in Christ. They are partial, frag- 
mentary, limited, and do not express it all, 
and cannot express it all. They are good 
as far as they go, and true as far as they 
go ; but they do not go to the end of the 
truth of God in Christ. There is no end. 
It is endless ; it is boundless ; it is infinite ; 
and more and more to every age it has 
been coming out, and more and more to 
every age it has been unfolding itself. 

What then should be the attitude of the 
person who believes in the gradual unfold- 
ing of the truth of God in Christ, towards 
an ancient doctrinal symbol ? He may ac- 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 19 

cept it fully, unequivocally, and without 
any reserve; and if he accepts it at all, 
he ought, I think, to accept it in that man- 
ner. But he does not and cannot accept 
it as a statement winch is exhaustive. He 
does not and cannot subscribe to it as some- 
thing complete and final. What then does 
he do ? What ought he to d.o ? Ought he 
to repudiate and reject it ? No, not neces- 
sarily. Ought he to try to change and 
revise it? No, not necessarily. Ought 
he to try by some clever process of inter- 
pretation to read into it a meaning — some 
new and modern meaning — which it does 
not legitimately bear, and was not intended 
to bear, thus putting new wine into old 
bottles, and new cloths into old garments, 
and making patchwork of them? No; 
that, it seems to me, is not ingenuous. I 
will not say it is not honest, for honesty 
applies to motive, and the motive in such 
a case is, I am sure, good ; but the method 
I think is bad. What then does he do, or 
what should he do ? He should ascertain 
in full or in part the purpose for which 
that doctrinal symbol was originally fash- 
ioned and drawn, and then proceed to in- 
quire whether he can indorse and approve 



20 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

that purpose. If he can, then, although 
the symbol in its outward form may be 
faulty, he is not called upon, in my judg- 
ment, to reject it, nor even to change and 
revise it. Let me illustrate : and as I am 
more familiar with the doctrinal symbols 
of the Episcopal Church, let me find my 
illustration there ; and because of their ad- 
mitted faultiness in some respects let me 
find it in those doctrinal symbols which 
are usually designated as the " Thirty-nine 
Articles," and which are in many respects 
like the other doctrinal symbols of the 
period of the Reformation. 

Those Articles, as every student knows, 
were put forth by their f ramers as a strong 
and vigorous protest against many of the 
teachings supposed to be erroneous of the 
Church of Rome. At the time of the Re- 
formation those teachings had been re- 
nounced and thrown off by the Anglican 
Church ; and in order to keep them from 
coining back into her fold again, those doc- 
trinal barriers were erected. That is the 
way in which they came to be. That is 
their meaning and purpose. Now, as long 
as we sympathize with that purpose, and 
believe that it is our duty to protest against 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 21 

those doctrinal teachings of the Church of 
Rome, it would be both unwise and unne- 
cessary to remove those doctrinal barriers. 
And yet, as is generally admitted with 
reference to other matters which did not 
enter into and constitute a part of the con- 
troversy of that time, those Articles are 
very imperfect. 

The Sixth Article says, for instance, 
" Holy Scripture consists of all those books 
of whose authority there was never any 
doubt in the Church." And then it pro- 
ceeds to enumerate the sixty-six books 
which we have in our Bible to-day. Now, 
modern scholarship has shown it to be 
a fact, which was not known then, but 
which now no one dreams of disputing, 
that the authority of some of those books 
in our Bible was for a long time doubted 
in the Christian Church, and that the doubt 
was not wholly removed until the fourth or 
fifth century. If, therefore, we accept the 
first part of the Article, which says that 
" Holy Scripture consists of all those books 
of whose authority there was never any 
doubt in the Church," we cannot without 
stultifying ourselves accept the second part 
of the Article, which says that the Bible 



22 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

consists of the sixty-six books which are in 
it now. But what was the purpose of the 
Article ? To determine the scope and limit 
of the Scriptural canon ? Yes ; but at the 
same time to protest against the attempted 
introduction into our Protestant Bible of 
those Apocryphal books, whose authority 
was coming to be recognized by the Roman 
Catholic Church, and which to-day are 
found in the Roman Catholic Bible. With 
that purpose we sympathize ; at least I sup- 
pose we do, and therefore we do not wish 
to have the Article removed which de- 
clares and expresses that purpose. Faulty 
though it is, we can and do indorse it. 
But let us not, when we know that it was 
intended for one thing, apply it to some- 
thing else which did not come into the 
range of the purpose for which the Article 
was framed. 

And so with reference to other doctrinal 
symbols which we have inherited from the 
past. Some of them, to be sure, like the 
early creeds of Christendom, are on a much 
higher plane than those which I have been 
considering. They are Ecumenical sym- 
bols, and received the sanction of Christen- 
dom at large ; while these are but provincial 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 23 

symbols, and received the sanction of only 
a part of Christendom. But the method 
of interpretation is the same in both cases. 
We must not try to evade them, or twist 
them, or pervert them, or to make them 
yield a meaning they were not intended to 
yield. Our aim should be to ascertain the 
purpose for which they were framed, and 
our indorsement of them should be simply 
an indorsement of that purpose, and should 
not be made to apply to purposes to which 
the symbols themselves were not intended 
to apply. 

And what is true of the doctrines of the 
past is true also of the practices of the 
past. Let me illustrate further : In an age 
when force and violence were more prev- 
alent in human society than they are now, 
there were men in the Christian Church, 
brave and strong, who banded themselves 
together into a society which taught and 
enforced the doctrine of unquestioning and 
implicit obedience to authority. Monasti- 
cism in its day was good, was needed. It 
did a righteous work, and that righteous 
work we indorse ; but we will not go back 
to monasticism. At a time when the lax- 
ity of public sentiment had almost legal- 



24 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

ized and sanctioned a kind of practical 
polygamy and the most hideons and re- 
volting excesses, and had produced in 
society, and to some extent in the Christian 
Church and ministry, an unbridled moral 
corruption, there were men in the Christian 
Church, brave and strong, who took upon 
themselves before God a vow of perpetual 
chastity. Celibacy in its day was good, 
was needed. It did a righteous work, and 
that righteous work we indorse; but we 
will not go back to celibacy. At a time 
when the Catholic Church for its own mer- 
cenary purposes was trafficking in good 
works and selling out indulgences to the 
people, it was not untimely or unneeclful 
that a man of strong individuality, like 
John Calvin, should arise, making promi- 
nent again before everything else the doc- 
trine of the divine decrees, declaring that 
the salvation of men was entirely inde- 
pendent of works, their own or others', and 
was determined solely by the sovereign 
purpose and predestination of God; thus 
cutting up the Romish doctrine of indul- 
gences by the roots. Calvinism in its day 
was good, was needed. It did a righteous 
work, and that righteous work we indorse. 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 25 

But, it is not necessary, some of us think, 
to go back to Calvinism. 

And so I say with reference to other be- 
liefs and practices of the Christian Church 
in the past. In order to understand them 
we must know something of what they 
were trying to do, and of the strength and 
character of the inimical forces against 
which they were fighting. Who can under- 
stand the tactics of a military commander 
without understanding something of the 
ground on which he is fighting, and of the 
difficulties which he encounters, and of 
the army arrayed against him ? We judge 
of his conduct, not in the abstract, and up 
as it were in the air, but down on the 
ground, the earth, and with reference to 
the particular exigencies of that particular 
time and that particular fight. Was it 
right and good in its aim ? Was it right 
and good in its purpose? Did the com- 
mander do the best he could with the 
forces at his command ? Perhaps at another 
time, and in another conflict, and facing a 
different foe, he would proceed in a differ- 
ent manner, would occupy a more advan- 
tageous position on the field of battle, and 
would have besides a better equipment to 



26 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

fight with. So, too, with reference to reli- 
gions beliefs and symbols which have come 
to us from the past. They are the symbols, 
many of them, of an earnest theological 
warfare on the part of men who were strug- 
gling to apprehend and defend the truth. 
They are the weapons with which they 
fought, with which they went out — those 
old sturdy and doughty defenders of the 
Christian faith — to meet and do battle 
with the enemy; and they fought hard 
and well. They gave no quarter : they 
made no compromise. They fought to kill 
and destroy, and they did kill and destroy ; 
and many a rampart have they taken, and 
many a stronghold razed. And we to-day 
are living purer and freer lives, and breath- 
ing larger liberties, because of what they 
did, and of the way in which they fought. 
Surely they could not have fought more 
bravely or more truly than they did. God 
give us the courage which they had ! But 
surely, too, if they were living now, they 
would fight in a somewhat different man- 
ner. They would find, I believe, different 
and, in some respects, better weapons to 
fight with : a wider critical knowledge ; a 
better critical equipment; a finer critical 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 27 

insight ; a larger field to move on ; and dif- 
ferent foes to encounter. But did they 
do, not what was ideally best, but what 
was best in the circumstances ? Was their 
aim good, and their purpose ? Do we sym- 
pathise with that purpose ? Do we think 
it right and true ? If we do, then we ac- 
cept the doctrinal form or symbol in which 
it is expressed, " Not as a barrier in the 
way of progress, but as a badge of victory 
in some hard-fought battle of the past." 
We are not called upon, as another has 
aptly phrased it, to commit " retrospective 
suicide " in our loyalty to the present, 
neither are we called upon to commit pre- 
sent suicide in our loyalty to the past. 

There are two tilings which the man who 
looks upon the Christian religion in the 
light of its historical development will not 
be likely to do, two mistakes which he will 
not be likely to make. First, he will not 
lightly throw off the past, but will stand 
upon, and believe in, and be strengthened 
by the past ,• saying, like Dante's pilgrim, 
as he faces the unknown future, " I jour- 
neyed on o'er that lonely steep, the hinder 
foot still firmer ; " he will not lightly 
throw off the past. And, second, he will 



28 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

not be slavishly bound by it. He will look 
upon the present, not as detached from, 
but as growing out of, the past, as the man 
grows from the child ; and he will go for- 
ward into the future, not fettered, but 
equipped ; believing, not in a God of con- 
fusion, but in a God of order, who has been 
working in the past, is working in the pre- 
sent, and will continue to work in the 
future ; and, like a well-instructed scribe, 
he will bring forth from the inexhaustible 
treasure-house of the Christian religion 
things both new and old. 

The Christian Church has not yet appre- 
hended all the truth that is in Jesus Christ, 
for, as I have said, it is an infinite quan- 
tity, and embodied in an infinite person- 
ality, and she must continue to search for 
the truth ; and when she stops the search 
she will suffer loss in power, and her vital- 
ity will wane. " I think," says John Locke, 
in writing to his young friend Anthony 
Collins, " that I am now beginning to see 
the truth in full and perfect form, and that 
I shall not have to search for it much 
longer. But this," he adds significantly, 
"is at the end of my days." Ah, yes, the 
old philosopher's life was waning and pass- 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 29 

ing away, and this was the sign of it ; ceas- 
ing to search, and therefore beginning to 
die. So will it be with the Christian Church. 
Ceasing to search for the truth of God in 
Jesus Christ, her redeeming power in 
society and her quickening force will fail ; 
and when she thinks she has found it all, 
she will begin to die ! But she will not 
die. She will live. And, searching more 
and more for the truth of God in Christ, 
she will more abundantly live ; will more 
fruitful and vigorous become ; more beau- 
tiful in her form, more helpful in her 
worship, more useful in her work, more 
attractive in her teaching, more compre- 
hensive in her scope. 

Christian theology then, young gentle- 
men, is not stationary, but progressive. It 
is the effort of men, and the successful 
effort, to interpret Jesus Christ ; and that 
interpretation, or those interpretations, 
without reserve we accept; but not, of 
course, as fully interpreting Jesus Christ. 
We do not accept them in that way. We 
cannot accept them in that way. To ac- 
cept them in that way is to reject them. It 
is to make Christ less than what they try 
to express, and what they do express. It 



30 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

is to make Him limited and finite, which 
they declare He is not ; and in declaring 
that He is not finite, they declare them- 
selves to be but the partial expression of 
Him. Then, again, those doctrinal state- 
ments are, after all, but the words of man ; 
and the strongest words of man, and the 
finest words of man, cannot always inter- 
pret even man himself, and have the effect 
often, not to express, but to stifle what is 
best and deepest in him. Have you never 
known what it is to listen to the strains of 
some magnificent music, which like an in- 
spiration of heaven seemed to come and 
touch so sweetly, yet so strongly, your 
answering heart and soul, and to lift you 
up for a moment as into the very joy of 
the presence of God ? And then, when you 
dared not speak or whisper, or scarcely 
breathe, lest the spell should be broken, 
some little critical, superficial soul has 
come bustling up into your presence with 
his chattering comment, and extinguished 
the dream which was on your soul, and 
driven its glory away. The music — that 
was your word, which best expressed and 
phrased what you thought and felt, or what 
you longed to be, and all others seemed out 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 31 

of place. The artist stands with brush and 
palette, day after day, before his canvas, 
trying so hard to speak. He says nothing ; 
his lips are dumb ; there is silence around 
him, and he would not have it disturbed. 
Yet the deep, unuttered thoughts which are 
buried in his soul, with the best possible 
expression, and in the most appropriate 
manner, are gradually coming out; and 
then, when his work is done, he points to 
the finished picture and says, " There, that 
is what I think ; that is what I feel ; that 
is what I believe ; that is my creed ; and 
all the thought, and beauty, and life of nry 
soul is there, as no language of mine can 
express it ! " 

An English traveller has told us that 
once in the course of his life he witnessed a 
storm at sea, so magnificent in its propor- 
tions, so sublime in its forms and effects, 
that he was lifted up out of himself, and 
lost all sense of himself. And, as the 
winds struck the waters and lifted them up 
into mountains, and the thunders uttered 
their voice, and the lightnings forked and 
flashed and wrapped the clouds in flame, 
and all nature reeled in the shock, there 
was borne in upon his soul such a sense of 



32 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

the greatness, the glory, the awful majesty 
of God, as no language of man could ex- 
press it, and whose only fit and proper 
word — symbol, doctrine, if you please — 
was the storm. 

The words of man, I say, cannot inter- 
pret even all that is in man. How much 
less, then, can they interpret all that there 
is in Jesus Christ ! And, standing before 
the picture of His great and wonderful life, 
as on the Gospel pages, — in the words of 
man, to be sure, but in the words of man 
so fitly chosen that they seem to be not 
the words of man, but part of the picture 
itself, — as on the Gospel pages that picture 
is portrayed, we are made to feel that there 
is a beauty, and a power, and a majesty 
there which no other words of man, how- 
ever emotionally fine, or philosophically 
true, or metaphysically subtle, can express. 
Standing there, we seem, not by conscious 
effort, but instinctively, involuntarily, to 
be carried far above all formal definitions 
of Him, and Christ Himself is the Word 
which best expresses what we think and 
feel, and what we most truly believe. For 
practical working purposes we have, indeed, 
and must have> our definitions of Him, 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 38 

and must try to put in forms of speech 
our thoughts and opinions about Him. 
Some in the past have done it ; and what 
they have done we accept, and are grateful 
to them for it. We could not if we would 
repudiate their work ; and we do not wish 
to repudiate it, nor even indeed to change 
it. It is theirs ; it is ours ; and we hold it 
as the heritage received from them,- and 
we can no more reject it than to-day can 
reject yesterday, or to-morrow reject to- 
day ; and yet to-day is more than yesterday, 
and to-morrow will be more than to-day. 

As the men of the past contributed some- 
thing, contributed much, to the knowledge 
of the truth of God in Christ, so must the 
men of the present contribute some further 
knowledge which will be added to theirs, 
as the knowledge contributed by the men 
of the future will be added to ours. The 
beautiful dream of Coleridge may then 
perhaps be realized, and the Christian 
Church may become like a great univer- 
sity school, in which all the members and 
pupils, having presented their admission 
contracts, will walk at large and at liberty, 
alone now, and now in groups, meditating 
and conversing, gladly listening to some 



34 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

elder disciple whom the spirit of God has 
taught, or lovingly communing with some 
class fellow, while the common concern 
will be peace, order, courtesy, mutual for- 
bearance, reverence, patience, kindness, 
charity, love for each and all, and the com- 
mon devotion of all and each to their 
common Master and Lord. Yes, their 
common Master and Lord, who, as repre- 
sented and portrayed on the pages of the 
Gospel story, is always greater and more 
than any doctrinal statement that can be 
framed about Him. 

That, as Christian preachers to-day, 
should be your relation to the past. Grate- 
ful and glad for what of Jesus Christ it 
has shown you, but more grateful and 
more glad because He is more than what 
it has shown you. Who always has been 
more, and always will be more. Who, 
from the very beginning of the history of 
the Christian Church down to the present 
time, has bcjen unfolding Himself in many 
ways and forms to the consciousness of 
the Christian Church. And, "From the 
vision and voice at Damascus," if I may 
bring this lecture to its close as one has 
closed the introduction to his book, " From 



THE PREACHER AND THE PAST 35 

the vision and voice at Damascus, and the 
tremendous words uttered in the midst of 
the Seven Golden Candlesticks over the 
Greek Sea, the Mystical Presence still 
glides and shines. Gleams and echoes of 
it linger on the Roman roadside, by the 
Domine Quo Yadis, on the Hall of the 
Round Table at Winchester ; on the clear- 
ing in the woodland where the Merciful 
Knight drew rein before the Crucifix. 
And again, and yet again it has returned, 
a voice and a vision, to such as have at 
any time believed they saw and heard it, 
of whom some remain to this present, but 
the greater part are fallen asleep." 

The theme, then, young gentlemen, 
which you are called to study and preach, 
is an inexhaustible theme, for that theme 
is Jesus Christ. And depths below depths 
are in it ; and heights beyond heights are 
in it, which have never been fathomed or 
scaled, and which invite you to the attempt. 
And, listening to the voices which are 
sounding about you to-day, and which at 
times seem so bewildering ; and consider- 
ing with an open and a fearless mind all 
the forms of thought which are pressing 
upon you to-day, and which at times seem 



36 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

so disturbing, you will find, I am sure, at 
last, that just so far indeed as those voices 
and thoughts are true, they will simply 
give or be some new points of view from 
which to see new meanings and wonders 
in Jesus Christ. 

" Then stand before that fact, that Life and 
Death 
Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread ; 
As though a star should open out, all sides 
Grow the world on you." 



THE 

PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 



THE 
PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 

T N the previous lecture we considered the 
work of the preacher in its relation to 
the past. Let us consider now his work in 
its relation to the present, the society in 
which he lives, and of which he forms a 
part, and to which he is called to preach. 
The physician who prescribes without an 
adequate knowledge of the case for which 
he prescribes will not prescribe well ; and 
the preacher who preaches without an 
understanding of the society to which 
he preaches, its prevailing temper or dis- 
temper, will not preach well. Before, 
therefore, I can hope to tell you anything 
about the method of your preaching to-day, 
I must try to tell you something about 
to-day. For it is to to-day, and not to 
yesterday, that you will presently preach. 
You must never forget that. And how can 
you preach to to-day, unless you have some 
knowledge of what to-day is? And what 



40 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

is it? How may it be described? To 
answer such questions fully would be ex- 
tremely difficult, if not impossible. Society 
to-day is not simple in its composition, but 
multiform and complex. The tendencies 
in it are not only numerous, but various, 
and often indeed contrary. They run in 
different directions, and currents and ed- 
dies are in it proceeding in different paths. 
That is what makes society to-day so inter- 
esting. It has within it so much life; so 
much of the exuberance of life; so much 
of the heterogeneousness of life; and in 
looking at or describing it, or in attempting 
to describe it, one thinks of the way in 
which the waters come down at Lodore. 
It is not this or that, it is both this and that, 
and never seems still or the same, but is 
always moving, and changing, and rushing, 
and plunging, and dashing, 

" Smiting and fighting, 
A sight to delight in ; 
Confounding, astounding, 
And deafening the ear with its sound ! " 

I am not about to attempt, therefore, 
anything so ambitious, or indeed so prepos- 
terous, as a comprehensive study of mod- 
ern society. That, I confess, is a task 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 41 

beyond my ability. It is also beside my 
purpose. I have no such generalizing 
process (a process always dangerous, and 
apt not to be true, because only partly 
true), I have no such generalizing process 
at present in my mind. I simply want you 
to look at society to-day from the point of 
view of the pulpit, and in its relation to the 
preacher, or rather in its relation to the 
message of the preacher, in order that you 
may understand the better not only what 
that message should be, but how to prepare 
and preach it. 

Looking, then, at society to-day in its re- 
lation to the preacher, what do we find? 
We find, in the first place, that it does not 
care about preaching as much as society 
yesterday did, or society the day before ; 
and that while it may need it just as much, 
it does not just as much think that it needs 
it. Preaching has been hitherto a very 
effective and much-appreciated factor in 
the development of the social life, and has 
helped very much to make it what at pres- 
ent it is. "It was by a sermon," says an 
English reviewer, " that the movement was 
inaugurated which has since grown into 
Christendom, and which is now by more 



42 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

silent though not less potent agencies visi- 
bly overspreading the earth. Men went 
forth preaching 'Jesus and the Resurrec- 
tion ; ' and from their generation we date, 
not our years only, but a new movement of 
human society which is filling the world 
with its pressures and its progresses still." 
That was true of preaching once. Is it 
true of preaching now? Is preaching 
equally valuable and important now ? Does 
it still have in the world an important 
work to do, or has it become to-day an 
anachronistic thing, a something out of 
date, a venerable institution which has 
survived in form, but in form only, like a 
rudiment which has lost its function, and 
which in the vast, and varied, and more 
highly developed economy of the modern 
social life has no proper place ? 

This latter view of preaching is the view 
of many. They do not care about it, or do 
not care very much about it. Eloquent 
preaching they care for, but chiefly be- 
cause it is eloquent, and not because it is 
preaching. And therefore they do not go, 
or do not go very much, to the place where 
preaching is done. Many, I know, do go ; 
and many churches there are which are 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 43 

always filled with earnest and interested 
congregations; but there are many more 
which are not. Nor is it always the ser- 
mon that constitutes the attraction in the 
case of those who do go to church. The 
Roman Catholic churches are as well filled 
as the Protestant, and perhaps better, and 
it is not the sermon that fills them. Neither 
is it the sermon that always fills the 
Protestant churches. Sometimes it is the 
service, the music, the ritual, the worship, 
the things which go before, which some of 
you call " the preliminaries." Sometimes, 
too, it is social convention that fills them, 
and people often go to church because their 
neighbors go, — their neighbors whom they 
esteem, their neighbors whom they affect ; 
and the religiousness which they exhibit, 
or which they seem to exhibit, we find 
when we come to analyze it, is not reli- 
giousness, but fashionableness. "I have 
often met with women," says the author of 
the book, "Without Dogma" (and men, 
too, he might have added), " to whom reli- 
gion was simply an item of the toilet ; and 
they dressed themselves in it, or in some 
particular form of it, as seemed to suit their 
style." That sounds severe ; but those of 



44 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

us who have had an opportunity in the 
practical work of the ministry to mingle 
much with the people who compose our 
congregations know that there is truth in 
it; and the fact that many people go to 
church to-day does not of necessity show 
that they go for the sake of religion, and 
still less for the sake of the sermon. It 
simply shows, I think, that people, like 
motives, are mixed, — religious people with 
other people, — and that it is not easy at 
present to draw the line distinctly between 
the church and the world. 

Whether, then, we consider those who 
go to church, or those who stay away, we 
find that people now do not as a rule attach 
so much importance to preaching as people 
formerly did. That is a fact, to be perhaps 
deplored, but not to be ignored, and which 
will not, I think, be disputed. And why is 
it a fact ? What is the explanation of it ? 
Is it the fault of the preacher ? To some 
extent I think it is, and of that I will speak 
later. But it is not altogether his fault. 
It is due in a measure to causes for which 
he is not responsible, but which neverthe- 
less he must try to overcome. The art of 
printing has a good deal to do with it. 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 45 

There was a time when if people desired 
instruction on the subject of religion they 
had to go to church and listen to a sermon. 
That was then the way, or at least the 
principal way, in which to receive instruc- 
tion. Now, however, it is only one of very 
many ways. The people to-day who are 
interested in homiletical instruction need 
not go to church and listen to a sermon, 
but can stay at home and read one, and a 
better one, perhaps, than many which they 
would hear, and thus be by the reading 
more than by the hearing helped. I know 
that truth is sometimes more persuasive, 
more stimulating and inspiring, when 
heard than when read; but I also know 
that the mind cannot so readily catch and 
hold the truth, or follow it out so fully as 
when it is "harvested by the quiet eye." 
And in these days of cheap and voluminous 
literature, with a public library in every 
town, and a private one in almost every 
house, when the sermons of a Liddon, 
or a Brooks, or a Spurgeon can be pur- 
chased for the small fraction of a dol- 
lar, when magazines and periodicals are 
freighted down with religious and theologi- 
cal lore, when the words spoken in West- 



46 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

minster, in St. Paul's Cathedral, and in all 
the great pulpits of Christendom can be so 
soon delivered upon their study table, to be 
read quietly at their own leisure, by their 
own fireside, why, pray, should people go 
to church to receive religious instruction 
by listening to a sermon? 

But that is not the only reason why 
many people to-day do not attach so much 
importance to preaching. There is another, 
for which the preacher is himself respon- 
sible. So much of the preaching to-day 
seems to be preaching to yesterday, or 
preaching about yesterday. It does not 
touch as it ought the contemporary life, and 
grapple with its problems, its duties, its dif- 
ficulties, its dangers. There is, in conse- 
quence, a sense of unreality about it, a for- 
eignness, a f ar-away-ness ; and to men who 
are of necessity preoccupied with the exigen- 
cies of contemporary life, it is not helpful 
preaching. Then, again, there is in preach- 
ing at times too much of o^Aer-worldness, 
and not enough of ^Ais-worldness. Instead 
of making it appear that the religion of 
Jesus Christ is chiefly for the present, we 
teach it in such a way as to produce on 
men the impression that it is chiefly for 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 47 

the future, disclosing to them the joys of 
the future, or the sorrows and pains of the 
future, — the joys of some future heaven, or 
the pains of some future hell. And they 
are apt, in consequence, to receive from us 
the notion that the principal function and 
use of the religion of Jesus Christ is to 
show them how to escape at last the latter, 
and to receive at last the former ; or how to 
get ready in this world to enter at last 
another, and to meet there their God. 
Whereas we ought to teach, so it seems to 
me, that that, instead of being the principal 
use of the religion of Jesus Christ, is, in 
fact, its least ; and that its purpose is not 
to help them to die right and to get into 
heaven after they die, but to help them to 
live right, and to get into heaven before 
they die. We should try to make them 
understand that there is a heaven here in 
this world, and a hell here in this world, 
and that those who at present are living in 
this world are in this heaven or this hell. 
And Jesus comes as light, we should try 
to make them understand, to show them 
how to get out of the hell which is here, 
or the hell-fire which is here, into the 
heaven which is here. The light with 



48 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

which He comes, to be sure, with which He 
shone and shines, is the light of another 
world, declaring another world, disclosing 
another world, its reality, its power, its life, 
its discriminating judgments, its discrim- 
inating awards ; the light with which He 
shines is the light of another world, but 
shining down upon and meant chiefly for 
this world. The sun is up in the sky, but 
it shines there for the earth ; and the way 
in which to use that light of the sun is not 
to stand gazing up into the sky and acquir- 
ing thus a physical myopia, or shortsighted- 
ness, which prevents the gazers from seeing 
clearly the things immediately about them, 
but to walk on the earth in the light of the 
sun, and with which on the earth it shines. 
So, too, we should try to teach men and 
women to-day that the way in which to use 
the light of another world shining in Jesus 
Christ, is not to stand gazing up into the 
heavens and acquiring thus a kind of spir- 
itual myopia, or shortsightedness, which 
prevents them from seeing clearly the forms 
of duty immediately about them, but to 
walk on the earth in the light of that other 
world which in Jesus Christ so brightly 
and beautifully appears. 



THE PREACHER AXD THE PRESENT -±9 

This brings me to the consideration of 
another reason why so many people to-day 
are not interested in sermons. The feeling 
is more or less prevalent, not only among 
the few, but also among the many, that reli- 
gion, so far as it relates to another world, is 
a subject upon which neither the preacher 
nor any one else can have any real and 
verifiable knowledge. It is admitted to be, 
indeed, a most important subject, and a 
most interesting subject, and yet of neces- 
sity unfathomable and unknowable. This 
necessary ignorance of the human mind 
upon the subject of religion has become in 
our time a philosophy or a science, or rather 
a nescience. And some of the most dis- 
tinguished and influential thinkers in the 
field of modern thought are declaring that 
while there is some power back of phenom- 
ena, or some power pervading phenomena, 
transcendent or immanent, or both, from 
which they all proceed, and by which they 
all transpire, yet from the very nature of 
the human mind, its relateclness, its concli- 
tionedness, we do not know and cannot 
what that power is like, or what in itself 
it is. This philosophy, as I have already 
intimated, is not confined in its influence 
4 



50 THE PREACHER AND HI 8 PLACE 

to the philosophical few. Philosophy never 
is. It reaches the masses of the people, 
and is felt more or less by all. " Though 
I care but little," says the French writer, 
De Tocqueville, " about the study of philos- 
ophy as such, I have always been struck 
with the influence which it has exerted 
over the things that seem to be the least 
connected with it ; and even over society 
in general, for abstract ideas, however 
metaphysical and apparently unpractical, 
penetrate at last, I know not how, into the 
realm of public morals." And so with 
that agnostic or nescient philosophy which 
is current now. Although in its metaphy- 
sical form it is intricate and abstruse, and 
beyond the popular grasp, it is not confined 
in its influence to the region of philosophy 
proper. It reaches the popular mind, it 
influences the popular judgment; and in- 
stead of dwelling apart like a star in the 
firmament of pure speculation, it is on the 
contrary shining with a light that leads 
astray (so at least I think) throughout the 
whole economy of the modern practical 
life. Or, changing if I may the simile, its 
spirit seems to be in the very air to-day, and 
everywhere we meet it, and everywhere we 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 51 

breathe it. In colleges we meet it; in 
clubs and drawing-rooms, in papers and 
books, and magazines ; in the poetry of the 
day ; in the fiction of the day ; in all the 
forms and phases of the literature of 
the day. And when from time to time the 
preacher's voice is heard speaking of God, 
and the soul, and the immortal life, and 
a world beyond this world ; another voice 
seems to come back in a kind of antiphonal 
response, that these are matters, however in- 
teresting, upon which the preacher has no 
knowledge, or at least no verifiable knowl- 
edge ; that these are problems which the 
preacher cannot solve, which nobody can 
solve, which are of necessity unsolvable, 
and that round and round in a circle we 
must forever go, and " ever more come out 
by the same door that in we went." 

And so it has come to pass that the age 
in which we live is to a great extent on 
the subject of religion silent. In some 
respects, indeed, it is loud and noisy enough, 
and the battle of words is fierce, and the 
strife of tongues is great, and clamorous, 
and incessant. Possibly there never was 
a time, with the exception of the bright 
and palmy days of Athenian culture, when 



52 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

there was so much mental inquisitiveness 
in society at large as there is in society 
now. And that mental inquisitiveness, 
which through paper and book and maga- 
zine, as well as through the medium of 
private and personal conversation, is caus- 
ing itself to be heard, has contributed in 
no little degree to our mental enlighten- 
ment and enrichment. We are talking a 
good deal to-day on many and various sub- 
jects. We are talking, too, to some pur- 
pose ; and in spite of the superficialness of 
much of our speech, we are, I think, as a 
rule talking wisely and well. But when 
it comes to the consideration of religious 
questions, there is a growing feeling upon 
the part of thoughtful people that it is 
better not to talk, that it is better just to 
be silent. I do not forget that there is 
a good deal of religious controversy, and 
discussion, and criticism going on; and 
that here, too, the strife of tongues and the 
battle of words is fierce. And yet despite 
this fact, which is obvious enough, there is 
a conviction stealing over the minds of 
many, like a creeping paralysis, that it 
is after all and for the most part simply 
a battle of words, in which they can make 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 53 

no progress towards a permanent and final 
conclusion. What is settled to-day, they 
think, will be unsettled to-morrow ; then 
the next day they will have to try to 
settle it again ; and thus round and round 
in a circle of search they must go, in wan- 
dering mazes lost. It is just this feeling, 
I think, that drives so many people into 
the Roman Catholic Church. They are 
tired to death of searching and not finding, 
" of dropping buckets into empty wells, and 
growing old in drawing nothing up." They 
want to be settled and fixed in a way that 
will not have to be unsettled and unfixed. 
Their chief desire is for some kind of final 
faith. They are not, perhaps, particular, 
after a long and fruitless search, what kind 
of faith it is, if only it is positive and final. 
They think that Rome has it, because she 
so stoutly claims it, and so to Rome they 

go- 
There is, however, another and larger 

and more thoughtful class to whom that 
kind of relief is no relief at all. They 
have almost made up their minds that 
there is no relief to be had. Religion pre- 
sents a problem which they think cannot 
be solved. The philosopher cannot solve 



54 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

it, they say, at least he has not solved it. 
The historian cannot solve it, the scholar, 
the theologian, the preacher cannot solve it ; 
and while they are not indifferent to it, 
they have almost reached the conclusion 
that no conclusion can be reached, and 
that the best thing, therefore, which they 
can do is just to accept their limitations 
and make up their minds to be ignorant. 
That seems to me to be a characteristic of 
the present age. We cannot call it infi- 
delity exactly ; it is not infidelity. Or, if 
it be infidelity, it is very different from that 
old infidelity which formerly prevailed. 
That old infidelity, as has been said, was 
loud in its hate and defiance. This new 
infidelity, if we can call it such, is suave 
and serene in its ignorance. That old 
infidelity shrieked and screamed in its 
hatred of religion. This new infidelity 
simply shrugs its shoulders and goes on 
its way, and says, " You must excuse me ; 
I really know nothing about it." And 
so it has come to pass, that while the 
age in which we live is noisy and loud 
enough on almost everything else, and 
talkative enough, and inquisitive enough, 
with a buoyant and hopeful inquisitiveness 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 55 

which nothing stifles or stills, it is for the 
most part in religious matters quiet, and 
has but little to say. That is the temper, 
the philosophic temper or distemper, of the 
time; not only among the few, but also 
among the many, and who are made some- 
what indifferent to the voice of the preacher 
by it. 

And not only does it act negatively, it 
acts positively. It has an effect on con- 
duct, and the agnosticism of the age accen- 
tuates and intensifies the secularism of the 
age. That is inevitable. For if the things 
of religion are past our finding out, then 
let us address ourselves, men say, or think, 
to the things which are not past our find- 
ing out ; and in our ignorance of another 
and better world, let us make the best of 
this, and try the best we can to conquer, 
and overcome, and take possession of it. 
And so does life become chiefly a material 
thing, and its joys material joys, and its 
ambitions material ambitions, and its values 
material values. Its conception of great- 
ness and power means chiefly material 
greatness and power : so many horse-power, 
or, if that has become an obsolete phrase in 
these days of electrical experiment, so many 



56 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

volt-power. Its conception of growth and 
development means chiefly material growth 
and development, and facilities for getting 
about, or for going from place to place, 
and for talking at long distances, no mat- 
ter how poorly it talks, and nearly all 
whose problems by rapid transit are solved. 
It is a conception of greatness which thinks 
it the highest pitch of civilization if, to use 
Mr. Matthew Arnold's phrase, it can only 
make its trains run every half hour between 
one little dismal village and another little 
dismal village, and carry messages to and fro 
of the dismal life in each. And that is the 
materialism which is upon us now. Not 
the materialism of the school merely, but 
the materialism of the street, or the mate- 
rialism of the school producing the mate- 
rialism of the street, the office, the shop, 
the bank, the railroad, the drawing-room, 
the counting-room. The blind man in the 
Gospel story whose sight had been restored, 
but not fully restored, looked out, we are 
told, upon the people who were pressing 
and moving about him, and saw them as 
trees walking. A poor and purblind vision 
of human life it was. But is it not the 
vision which so many seem to have of 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 57 

human life to-day, as something chiefly 
physical, as something chiefly earthy, rooted 
in the earth, growing out of the earth, re- 
turning to the earth, receiving from the 
earth its substance, and haying in the 
earth its home, as the trees of the forest 
have ? The same vital forces are seen 
energizing in both, and feeding and nour- 
ishing both, except that in the case of our 
human life they have gone so far as to 
make the trees walk ! Is it not so ? Does 
it not seem so ? And looking at the way 
in which so many regard the human beings 
about them, wherein, after all, does it differ 
so much from the way in which they re- 
gard the growing trees about them ? They 
make of the tree a handle with which to do 
their work, and they make of the man a 
hand with which to do their work, and 
then they use them both, the handle and 
the hand; and it is often so hard to see 
where the handle stops, and where the 
hand begins. Or they gather from the tree 
the fruit, and they gather from the man 
the fruit, and both are good and useful 
because of the fruit they bear. And if 
sometimes the tree seems to be in their 
way they cut it down. And if sometimes 



58 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

the man seems to be in their way, and to 
stop and stay their progress, or hinder and 
block their path, why then they cut him 
down. "Ah, the pity of it," they say; 
yes, the pity of it, and yet so it must be. 
It is the way of the world ; it is the method 
of business ; it is the law of trade. They 
cut him down and spare not, as the forester 
cuts the tree down and spares not. 

Then look at the way in which those 
who are prosperous and better off regard 
the poor. Not recognizing chiefly and 
first of all the great and divine humanity 
in them, and trying to call it forth, but 
simply from their abundance ministering 
more or less to the immediate physical 
needs of those whom they seek to relieve, 
and stopping there and at that, and think- 
ing that that is all, or thinking that that 
is enough, — as though their beneficiaries 
were not so different after all from the 
trees under which they rest in some city 
square or park, except that the trees have 
somehow learned to tramp. Again, look 
at the way in which the poor in turn 
so often regard the rich, as simply fruit- 
ful trees that have somehow come to be 
planted in better and finer soil, as fruit- 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 59 

ful trees to be plucked, and by some 
ingenious and clever kind of appeal to be 
made to yield their fruit. And if some- 
times, when the need is great, and the fruit 
is temptingly near, the garden is entered 
and spoiled, and the fruit plucked and 
robbed, why the crime, after all, is not so 
great, it is only like robbing trees. Or 
look once more at the way in which so 
many seem to regard themselves : and 
wherein does it differ from the way in 
which a tree, supposing it could talk, 
would regard itself ? "I have come out of 
the earth," it would say, "and am simply 
a physical thing ; and by and by I know, 
like everything else that is physical, I must 
crumble away, and perish, and go back 
again to the earth. In the mean time let 
me live a joyous physical life. Let me 
gather from earth, and air, and gases, and 
seas, and skies, and clouds and sunshine in 
them, a physical beauty and bloom. And 
even from the rocks beneath me, around 
whose forms I twine, and into whose fissures 
I send my gnarled and twisted roots, — 
yes, even from the rocks beneath me let me 
gather physical strength, that the storms 
may not destroy me, nor the tempests beat 



60 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

me down, and that I may not fall and 
perish before my time." So would a tree 
talk if it could, and so indeed does many 
a man who can. 

And that is the voice of to-day, or one 
of the voices of to-day. Everywhere we 
hear it, — in the social world, in the com- 
mercial world, in the political world. It 
is the voice of the man who speaks of the 
physical value of the age, of the physical 
prosperity of the age, and the physical 
wealth of the age, and speaks about it 
eloquently and fluently, as though it were 
all in all. It is the voice of the man who 
measures all human movements and oppor- 
tunities, all human motives and methods, 
by a standard of physical excellence. 
And when you venture to say to him (not 
in the pulpit, where you are expected to 
say it, but out of the pulpit, where you are 
not expected to say it, and yet where you 
do say it, because you believe it) that the 
aim of a Christian man or a Christian 
people should be to seek first the Kingdom 
of God, and all those great, and pure, and 
lofty faiths and ideals which the Kingdom 
of God represents, he is smitten with dumb- 
ness or deafness, and does not know what 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 61 

you mean exactly, or thinks jovl are an 
unpractical, ' doctrinaire sort of person, 
whose business it is to do, and to do well 
of course, some preaching work on Sunday, 
and not to have any part in the real and 
actual conduct of earthly things and affairs. 
That is the type of man, and that is the 
kind of voice which is so often seen and 
heard. A good enough type it is in a 
certain sort of way. I have no fault to 
find with it for what it is, but chiefly for 
what it is not. It is truthful, and upright, 
and honorable. It is honest, and pays its 
debts ; and yet, withal, so earthy, so un- 
spiritual, so unaspiring, except towards 
earthy tilings. It seems to have in its 
life so little use for God, except upon 
occasions, and those not very frequent ; 
and if, as Dr. Martineau says, it should 
be told some day that God was dead, it 
would still go on pretty much as it does 
now. That, I say, is a very common type 
of humanity to-day, not in the sense of its 
being commonplace, but in the sense of its 
being prevalent. You will find it in the 
city ; you will find it in the country ; in 
the little country village ; in the little 
country town, where life is supposed to 



62 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

be (because of its pastoral environment) 
less sordid and mercenary, but where in 
fact you will find it just as hard and 
close ("nigh" I believe is the New Eng- 
land word), just as unresponsive to spirit- 
ual aims and ideals, if not indeed more so, 
than is the urban life. 

And not only outside of the church do 
you find that kind of person ; you find him 
in the church : as a regular attendant 
upon the services of the church, sitting 
perhaps in the front pew, and listening so 
attentively, so admiringly, to your eloquent 
discourse. A clerical friend of mine was 
preaching on one occasion from the text, 
" What is a man profited if he should gain 
the whole world, and lose his own soul?" 
He was a very gifted preacher, and was on 
that occasion particularly eloquent. And 
as he tried to show, in that rapt and fervid 
manner so characteristic of him, that the 
soul might be a present loss, a loss here and 
now, just as the mind might be a present 
loss, and that the wealth of the whole 
world would be in such a case to the man 
who had lost his soul, as to the man who 
had lost his mind, but a poor compensation, 
— one of the members of the church was 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT bd 

heard to say to a friend as he walked with 
him down the aisle at the close of the 
service, " Why, it is worth money to hear 
that man preach ! " Here, indeed, was not 
indifference to preaching, bnt a certain 
kind of appreciation of it and fondness for 
it. And yet with that appreciation of 
preaching, because it was good and elo- 
quent, there was also that dull, opaque 
imperviousness to preaching which pre- 
vented it from doing the good it was in- 
tended to do, and which knew no other 
or better way of expressing its appre- 
ciation than by rating it simply as a 
commercial commodity, and putting a 
commercial value upon it. And this, it 
seems to me, was not an exceptional case. 
And while there are not many who would 
express themselves perhaps with such a 
naive and simple frankness, there are many 
and very many whom it represents. You 
will meet them by and by ; you will preach 
to them ; and they will listen to and admire 
you, and say to their friends how well you 
preach, and that they ought to come and 
hear you. And sometimes as you preach 
your soul will be all aglow, and your heart 
will be all on fire, and your very body will 



64 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

tremble and quiver with the deep and 
strong emotion which is working in you, 
and you will think that surely now you 
have lifted up the people out of their 
spiritual apathy and dulness to seek first 
the Kingdom of God ; and then you will 
take up the collection, and you will see 
how much you have lifted up — the 
people. 

Now, I am not saying these things to 
discourage you, young gentlemen, I am 
saying them rather to encourage you by 
telling you about them beforehand, so that 
you may not be discouraged when hereafter 
you meet and experience them. The phy- 
sician is not discouraged — recurring to 
the simile which I used at the beginning — 
when he knows what that sickness is which 
he is expected to treat and cure. Why, 
that is half the battle ; and he cannot cure 
it unless he does know. Neither can you ; 
and my purpose in this lecture has been to 
try to show you what that sickness is which 
you are to try to cure. It is not enough to 
say that it is sin. Sin is the source of all 
sickness. And yet there are different sick- 
nesses, social as well as physical, and they 
are called by different names ; and my pur- 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 65 

pose has been to tell you something about 
the present social ailment, and to give you, 
as well as I could, a diagnosis of it. It has 
been, I know, a very partial and imperfect 
diagnosis, and has not covered all the symp- 
toms of the case. But I have shown you 
some of the symptoms, the chief of which, 
and perhaps the most dangerous, from your 
point of view at least, is this : that the pa- 
tient to whom you minister, and whom you 
hope to cure, does not always want to be 
cured, or believe that you can cure him, and 
therefore does not always call you in to 
prescribe. And yet the patient needs you, 
and what you have to give, or what you 
have to tell; your Christian message he 
needs. He cannot get on without it; or 
he cannot get on well without it. The 
men of to-day need religion as much as the 
men of yesterday. They do not need to 
have it presented to them in precisely the 
same manner, but they need it. They need 
it in temptation, in weakness and darkness 
and depression, in the conflict fierce and 
sharp of the modern competitive life. They 
need it to keep them pure ; they need it to 
keep them clean, morally pure and clean; 
to keep in due control the passions of the 
5 



66 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

body, which without the restraint of reli- 
gious hope and faith are apt, especially in 
these days of luxurious living, to break 
away and get dominion over them. And 
it is just as true now as it ever was, that 
the visible which does not rest on the 
invisible is apt to become the bestial. 
Scepticism concerning another world and 
sensuousness in this world are apt to go 
together. Sometimes, as in the case of a 
Don Juan, the sensuousness first, and the 
scepticism last. Sometimes, as in the case 
of a Faust, the scepticism first, and the 
sensuousness last. But whichever be the 
beginning, or whichever be the end, there 
is an affinity between them ; and, not al- 
ways, — it would be an exaggeration to 
say that, — but usually, they sooner or later 
meet ; and the person, or the people, or the 
age which is not walking in this world in 
the light of a world beyond, is apt to become 
in time a coarse and sensuous age. Its 
pleasures will show it; its pictures will 
show it ; its works of art will show it ; its 
novels, its stories, its letters, its theatres, 
its operas, its conversations, its drawing- 
rooms will show it, and the realism of 
which it boasts will become sooner or later 



THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 67 

the realism of impudicity and immodesty, 
of filth and mnd ! And with this realism 
of impudicity, which is coming to be some- 
what symptomatic of our modern life, there 
is another and kindred symptom, namely, a 
feeling of sadness or weariness, and hardly 
worth-whileness, which the vision of the 
whole physical universe without the vision 
of God and another world does not and 
cannot relieve. "Praise the Lord, O my 
soul ! " exclaims the Hebrew seer ; "let all 
that is within me join to bless His holy 
name ! " as with adoring wonder he looks 
at the starry skies, because he sees re- 
vealed the glory of God in the skies, while 
the greatest literary seer of the nineteenth 
century, looking at the same starry skies, 
says to his friend, Charles Lamb by his 
side, "Oh, mon, it is a sair sight!" So 
it is, cold, cheerless, overwhelmingly sad, 
if instead of revealing to us the glory of 
God and another world, day unto day 
uttering His speech, and night after night 
showing forth His knowledge ; it only re- 
veals the glory and greatness of man, of 
Newton and Copernicus and Kepler, and 
the other men of genius who have contrib- 
uted to the ascertainment of its laws. 



68 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

That, I say, is the sadness, in spite of all 
its enrichment and enlightenment, which 
seems to be resting so heavily on much of 
our modern life. As much, then, as ever, 
if not indeed more, men to-day need that 
light of another world which nearly two 
thousand years ago appeared in Jesus 
Christ. Quietly, gently, then it came, 
making no sound or noise, as the light 
always comes, — 

" It sparkles on the morning's million gems of dew, 
It flings itself into the shower of noon, 
It weaves its gold into the cloud of sunset, 
Yet not a sound is heard." 

So it came then, and so it comes now, into 
the morning, noon, and sunset of human 
life on earth. And so, too, young gentle- 
men, it must shine through us, not chiefly 
by the noise and clamor of our theological 
strife and ecclesiastical contention or as- 
sumption, but by trying as well as we can 
to live and teach and preach as He lived 
and taught who was then, and is now, the 
Light and the Life of the world. 



THE 
PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 



THE 
PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 

T X 7"HAT should be the message of the 
Christian pulpit to-day, and how 
should the preacher preach it ? 

These seem at first like simple, if not 
superfluous, questions, with only one an- 
swer to them. For it is the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ which the preacher is sent 
to preach, and which, therefore, he must 
preach. That, and that alone, must be his 
word to men, must be to them his mes- 
sage. But suppose they are not interested 
in his message ? Must he still continue to 
preach it? Surely he must, whether the 
people hear, or whether they refuse to hear. 
But suppose he can preach it in such a 
way as to make them hear, or make them 
willing to hear, ready and desirous to hear, 
ought he then to preach it in that way? 
That depends upon what the way is. If 
it is a right way, yes. If it is a 
wrong way, no. Preaching is not an 
end in itself, it is only a means to an end. 



72 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

This distinction is, I fear, sometimes over- 
looked, and some there are who think, or 
who apparently think, that the great desid- 
eratum (if not the greatest and only) in 
the evangelization of the community, is 
simply to get the people into the way of 
going to church. And therefore they re- 
sort to many and various expedients for 
the accomplishment of that purpose , — and 
some of them, too, expedients of very ques- 
tionable propriety, and others again not 
questionable at all, but cheap, vulgar, sen- 
sational, and unquestionably bad. The end, 
they seem to think, justifies the means; 
and the end here is simply going to church. 
But that is not the end. .It is, as I have 
said, only a means to an end ; and whether 
or not people should go to church depends 
a little, depends a good deal, on what hap- 
pens after they get there. 

I can conceive of cases where it would 
be better for people not to go to church, 
and where less harm would come to them 
by not going than by going. Have you 
not yourselves sometimes found it so? 
Have you not yourselves been made some- 
times to feel, after you had been to some 
particular church, that what you heard 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 73 

from the pulpit there had not only done 
you no good, but had actually done you 
harm, had irritated and exasperated you, 
and made you not better, but worse ? I am 
sure you must have had such an experience 
as that; we have all had such an expe- 
rience. And then, again, I am sure we 
have all had another and very different 
experience, and have felt as we listened to 
some men preach that we would like to listen 
to them often. They helped us so much ; 
they inspired us; they seemed to touch 
and awaken what was best and purest, 
what was divinest in us, and to bring it 
out and express it, and to make it, for a 
time at least, ascendent and dominant in 
us. And why? What was the secret 
of their power? They may have been 
eloquent in the ordinary sense of the 
term, or they may not have been. They 
may have been learned and scholarly, or 
they may not have been. Nor did we 
always agree, perhaps, with what we heard 
them say. And yet, somehow, they always 
managed to make us feel as though they 
had a personal message for us. And so, 
indeed, it was a personal message for us, — 
simply because it was their own personal 



74 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

message, a message which they themselves, 
in their deepest and innermost sonls had 
found and felt to be good, had found and 
felt to be true ; and which, therefore, pro- 
duced an echoing response in us. It may 
have been some truth which we already 
knew, some very familiar truth ; and yet as 
the preacher preached it, it seemed like 
something new and to have in it something 
new. And it did have in it something 
new; it had the preacher in it. He had 
made the truth his own. He had wrought 
it out, or fought it out, and won it for him- 
self, and it was like a piece of himself. He 
was not simply defining some article of the 
creed. He was not simply disclosing and 
making known "the faith once delivered 
to the saints," nor telling us what had been 
"always and everywhere and by all re- 
ceived." He was telling us rather what he, 
by his own living thought, by his own liv- 
ing experience, had made his very own. It 
was the travail of his soul, and we saw it, 
and felt it, and were satisfied. This does 
not imply that the substance of his preach- 
ing was something new and different from 
what was in the creeds, or something new 
and different from what was in the theology 






THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 75 

of the church to which he belonged ; but 
it does imply that the truth which others 
had found, and which had been by them 
expressed in a theology or a creed, had 
also found him, and become incarnated in 
him. And it was his message to us, as 
well as the creed's message. And he, the 
preacher, the man, the living man and 
preacher, was living in the creed, and mak- 
ing the creed live, and breathe, and move, 
and talk. And as a living thing we heard 
it, and as a living thing we felt it, — not as 
truth in abstract form, but as truth in form 
concrete ; as truth in flesh and blood. And 
that was his secret and power, or the secret 
of his power. It is always the secret of 
power. And when the pulpit loses that 
power it will have none, or none at least to 
differentiate it from other didactic agen- 
cies, and to make it a unique and distinc- 
tive force in the world. 

Creeds are good. Theologies are good. 
But creeds however scriptural, and theolo- 
gies however sound, are not of themselves 
enough. " I adjure you by the Jesus whom 
Paul preaches " is not a formula that will 
exorcise the evil spirits and make the men 
who hear obedient to the faith. The creed, 



76 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

they will say, we know, we have always 
known, and the theology we know ; but 
who and what are ye ? 

Plagiarism in a preacher or any one else 
is generally and justly regarded as a very 
reprehensible thing ; and. when we find out 
(and we usually do find it out) that a man 
has been stealing the words of another, we 
have no further use for that man. But 
there is a plagiarism in theology as well as 
a plagiarism in language, and it is possible 
not only to steal from books, but also to 
steal from creeds. And the preacher who 
goes week after week to some venerable 
storehouse of accumulated doctrines, and 
opens the door, and takes some doctrinal 
treasure out, and gives it forth to the peo- 
ple, simply because it is the doctrine of his 
church, without having first, in some sense 
real and true, made that doctrine his own, 
is a plagiaristic preacher ; and a plagiaristic 
preacher is not an effective preacher. And 
yet, it seems to me that much of our preach- 
ing to-day is of that plagiaristic kind. It is 
the preaching of things and doctrines which 
we have taken without buying, and which 
we accept and hold because others accept 
and hold them, — the school, the sect, the 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 77 

party, the church to which we belong ; and 
it is their faith we preach, and not ours. 
Perhaps we do not think so, but it is so 
more than we think; and that is the way 
in which it impresses those who hear us. 
They almost knew beforehand that we 
would say what we do say, because we are 
Baptists, or Congregationalists, or Episco- 
palians ; and that is what Episcopalians, 
and Congregationalists, and Baptists usu- 
ally say and are expected to say, and there- 
fore they expected us to say it, and they 
are not disappointed in us. Neither are 
they much impressed, or helped, or quick- 
ened by us ; and after a while they get tired 
of hearing us, and they do not come to hear 
us. And why should they ? They know all 
that we have to say just as well as we do, — 
the scheme of salvation, sanctification, re- 
demption, the new birth, the atonement, 
the doctrine of the divine decrees, the his- 
toric episcopate, the sacrament of baptism, 
and the Lord's Supper, and the decrees of 
the General Councils, and the inspiration 
of the Bible. They have heard it from 
their youth up, and know it all, I say, just 
as well as we do. And why indeed should 
they come, to hear it and know it some 



78 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

more ? And they do not come. And then 
it is that we are tempted to resort to those 
questionable expedients to which I have 
referred, such as advertising to preach on 
queer and fantastic texts and "sensational 
topics, with a view to making them come, 
and which, though successful in drawing, 
perhaps, are not successful in edifying, and 
which cheapen the pulpit, and degrade it in 
the judgment of sober-minded people. 

What then shall we do ? Shall we give 
up doctrinal preaching, and try some other 
kind, not sensational, but at the same time 
not doctrinal? By no means. We cannot 
give it up. All preaching is doctrinal, and 
must be. It may not be doctrinal after the 
standard of the Thirty-nine Articles, or the 
standard of the Westminster Confession ; 
but it is doctrinal, nevertheless, for doc- 
trine means simply a faith, a conviction, a 
belief, and no man can preach without 
some faith or belief. What people mean, 
I think, when they say they do not care 
for doctrinal preaching is this : they do 
not care for that kind of doctrinal preach- 
ing which has in it more of the personality 
of Calvin, or Luther, or Athanasius, than 
it has of the preacher himself. Stolen 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 79 

thunder is poor thunder ; and so is stolen 
doctrine. It does not go off well; or it 
goes off by itself, simply making a noise, 

— "Sound and fury, signifying nothing;" 
and there is no lightning in it. It must 
have been an impressive thing to hear Mar- 
tin Luther preach, or to hear Athanasius 
preach; and so it would be now. But it 
is not at all impressive to hear Lutheran- 
ism preached, or Athanasianism preached, 

— to hear a system preached. That is the 
kind of preaching to which the people ob- 
ject when they object to doctrinal preach- 
ing, and to which they ought to object. 

The distinctive power of the pulpit is its 
personality. Not primarily what it says, 
though that, of course, is important, but 
who says it ; otherwise a phonograph or a 
telephone would do. Truth, especially 
moral truth, is never very effective until we 
see it alive, — not truth in the fine discourse, 
or in the admirable essay, but truth in the 
soul, "that inmost centre," as Browning 
says, "where truth abides in fulness," and 
where, as from a throne, it speaks with 
authority to us. The orator who moves us 
most is the orator who is moved most ; not 
the orator who displays the most emotion, 



80 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

but whose own personality is kindled most 
by his thought. " If," says Horace to the 
sons of Piso, " you wish me to weep, there 
must be, first of all, a genuine grieving 
in you." "Whoever," says John Milton, 
"would not be frustrate of his desire to 
write well in poetry, must be a poet in life. 
Other things being equal, that will be the 
greatest and most effective verse, the soul 
of whose author is set on fire by the senti- 
ment which it expresses." And as it is 
with poetry, and art, and oratory, and liter- 
ature in general, so is it with preaching. 
Life responds to life. And how can the 
truth we preach be made quick and alive 
except by wrestling for it, or wrestling 
with it, and thus getting it into and mak- 
ing it a part of ourselves, so that we our- 
selves go with the truth we preach, and 
make it a personal force ? 

This was the power of Jesus. The 
truths He preached and taught were not, 
for the most part, new. Isaiah had taught 
them before Him, and Moses, and all the 
prophets. And not only by the prophets of 
Israel had many of those truths been taught, 
but by the prophets of Greece, India, and 
China, and the Wise Men of the East. 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 81 

But when Jesus taught those truths they 
were old as though they were new. For 
He did not teach as the scribes, quoting 
texts and authorities. He was His own 
authority, and He spake with authority, — 
not with the authority of supernaturalism 
merely, but the authority of personality, a 
personality which had made those truths 
its own, and which gave them life, and 
power, and a confirmatory sanction that 
needed no other sanction. Surely we know 
what that means, though it is hard to de- 
scribe it. We have often, however, felt it, — 
not in the case of the pulpit merely, but in 
matters outside of the pulpit. A person 
tells us something which he has heard 
from some one else, and that person again 
from some one else, — of an accident, per- 
haps, or a rescue, or some heroic deed, — and 
the information is trustworthy, and we be- 
lieve it. But it is second, or third, or fourth- 
hand information, and not first-hand. And 
while perhaps it has gained something in 
the telling in the way of exaggeration, and 
is more verbose and rhetorical, it has also 
lost something. It has lost much ; and 
never do we know how much until we 
hear him tell it who has himself seen it, 

6 



82 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

who was an eye-witness of it, and who 
gives to ns his own eye-witness version of 
.it. His words may be poor and few, and 
with stammering tongue may he speak ; 
and yet his words have power, and his 
stammering tongue has eloquence. And 
something there is in his voice, his accent, 
his gesture, his emphasis, it is hard to say 
what it is, something perhaps in his soul, 
which touches the soul in us, and awakens 
the soul in us, and life responds to life, 
and we know not only that the man is 
speaking truth, but we feel the power of 
truth, and he speaks with authority to us. 

This, I say, was the method of Jesus. 
He was not a mere teacher of the truth, 
He was an eye-witness of it. He saw it 
not merely through the medium of the 
observation of others, but through the 
medium of His own observation. He saw 
it, as it were, " first-hand ; " not as it came 
from man, but as it came from God, as it 
came from God to Him, as the Spirit of 
God taught it, and made Him feel and 
know it, made it indeed His, or rather 
made it Him. And we, too, are to be eye- 
witnesses of the truth, as we see it in Him 
with our own eyes, with our own minds, 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 83 

and hearts, and souls, with our own moral, 
and spiritual, and intellectual natures, and 
not as indirectly and obliquely we see it in 
Him through others. Here at least, it 
seems to me, whatever may be thought of 
it in other respects, is the doctrine of the 
Apostolical Succession true. Those who 
preach Jesus Christ must be themselves, 
as the apostles were, eye-witnesses of Jesus 
Christ. That is what constitutes apos- 
tleship, — eye-witnessing of Jesus Christ ; 
and those who are the successors of the 
first apostles must succeed them also in 
that. They must be not only historical 
successors, but spiritual successors. The 
former kind of succession may be neces- 
sary in the judgment of some of us to pre- 
serve the polity of the Church, but the 
latter kind is necessary to preserve the 
pulpit of the Church, whether it be a Con- 
gregational or an Episcopal pulpit. That 
was the power of the first pulpit in Christ- 
endom, and it will be the power of the 
last. And from first to last men feel that 
power and respond to it. That, I presume, 
is what they mean when they say, as they 
often do, that they want practical preach- 
ing. Now, it is very difficult to define 



84 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

practical preaching. No two persons, per- 
haps, would define it in the same way ; for 
what would be practical to one man, in 
one set of circumstances, would not be 
practical to another man in another set of 
circumstances. It is, I believe, the author 
of " Ecce Homo " who says that practical 
preaching for him would be preaching on 
the doctrine of the Logos, — " In the be- 
ginning was the Word, and the Word was 
with God, and the Word was God. All 
things were made by Him, and without 
Him was not anything made that was 
made." That was what he would call 
practical preaching, and what most of 
those in our congregations would call very 
unpractical. And so, again, preaching on 
the forgiveness of enemies would not be 
practical preaching to the man who has no 
enemies, or who has no malice against 
them. Practical preaching for the old 
would not be practical preaching for the 
young. Practical preaching for the sick 
would not be practical preaching for the 
well. Practical preaching for the rich and 
comfortable would not be practical preach- 
ing for the poor and uncomfortable. It 
is not easy to define practical preaching. 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 85 

It depends so much on the time, and the 
place, and the congregation, which is gen- 
erally very much mixed, and a score of 
other things which the preacher cannot 
well have in mind when he is preparing 
his sermon. What men really mean when 
they say they want practical preaching 
is that they want personal preaching, — 
preaching that has in it the personality of 
the preacher. Perhaps they would not put 
it that way, but that is the way I put 
it; for that, it seems to me, is practical 
preaching, and the best kind of practical 
preaching. Nor does it matter much what 
the particular theme is, — the doctrine of the 
Logos, or the doctrine of the atonement, 
or the doctrine of the forgiveness of inju- 
ries. The people, as they hear, are stirred 
and kindled by it, because the preacher 
himself is stirred and kindled by it. It 
is his life going into them. And, again, 
life responds to life, and enthusiasm to 
enthusiasm. 

That is the distinctive tiring in preach- 
ing. It involves, of course, the giving of 
instruction. But it involves something 
more than the giving of instruction, for 
that, as we have seen, can be given in other 



86 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

ways. With the giving of instruction 
there should be the giving of life, — the 
preacher's life, his moral and spiritual life, 
and intellectual life, — as the Spirit of God 
has awakened his moral, and spiritual, and 
intellectual life. 

I spoke in the last lecture of the mate- 
rialistic temper of modern society, and how 
it is disposed to judge and measure all 
things by standards of material value. 
That is the ailment which the Christian 
minister to-day must try to cure. And 
how must he try to cure it ? Must he try 
to show the wrongness or the falseness of 
materialism by a philosophic discoursing 
about it? Must he be forever dragging 
what he believes to be a better and truer 
philosophy up the pulpit stairs, and dis- 
cussing before miscellaneous congrega- 
tions, in philosophic phrase and dialect, that 
subtle, agnostic teaching which is to-day 
so penetrating and pervasive, and which is 
doing so much to undermine the spiritual 
foundations of life, and destroy its spirit- 
ual ideals ? No, I do not think so ; although 
I think he should be competent to do it at 
proper times and in proper places, and that 
his training is sadly deficient if he is not 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 87 

competent to do it. But for the preacher 
in the pulpit there is a more excellent way. 
There, it seems to me, he is not so much 
to talk in a philosophic way about spiritual 
forces and entities, as to be a kind of spir- 
itual force and entity himself ; thus touch- 
ing, and quickening, and making real the 
spiritual forces and entities in those to 
whom he speaks. This is not an easy 
tiling to do : and because it is not easy we 
are sometimes tempted to do what is not so 
difficult, and that is to try to meet a philo- 
sophic or practical materialism with an 
ecclesiastical materialism. Here, again, 
the Roman Catholic Church shows its 
knowledge of human nature. It repre- 
sents God to the eye, or professes to do so 
at least. It makes Him visible in actual 
flesh and blood upon the altar. It gives 
Him shape and form for men to see and 
behold with physical sight and vision, and 
in the act of beholding to worship and 
adore. That is the charm, to the devout 
Roman Catholic worshipper, of the sacrifice 
of the Mass, that it makes Jesus Christ live 
and die before his very eyes. And the sol- 
emn scene that was enacted upon Calvary 
eighteen hundred years ago is re-enacted 



88 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

for him with all its sad and tragic realism 
in the midst of the modern world. " To 
me," says John Henry Newman, " nothing 
is so consoling, so thrilling, so uplifting, so 
overcoming, as the Mass. I could attend 
it forever and not be tired ; for it is not a 
mere form of words, it is a great action, 
the greatest action that ever can be on earth. 
It is not the Invocation merely ; but, if I 
dare use the word, the 'Evocation,' the 
calling out, the manifestation in visible 
form to the physical eye of that Eternal One 
becoming actually present upon the altar 
in our flesh and blood, before whom angels 
bow and devils tremble ! " That is what 
it meant to him ; and although my whole 
nature revolts at the materialism of the doc- 
trine that underlies it, I think I can under- 
stand how — not upon a cultivated mind 
like Newman's, but upon uncultivated or 
half cultivated minds — it can have such 
wonderful power, just because it is so ap- 
pealing to the physical senses. 

There is another phenomenon in our 
modern society which points in the same 
direction, which calls itself by the name of 
Spiritualism, but which is in fact the gross- 
est materialism. It is a worse form of 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 89 

materialism even than that which underlies 
the doctrine of the Mass, disclosing such 
an utter want of spirituality on the part 
of those who accept it that they are not able 
apparently to believe in the existence of 
spirit unless they can see and touch it, 
and hear it " mutter " and talk. And what 
a commentary it is upon the materialistic 
temper of modern life that so many other- 
wise sensible people to-day should accept 
a sign so puerile to strengthen their waver- 
ing faith in the reality of a spiritual world, 
and to save themselves from the sheer 
despair of having no faith at all. 

The same materialistic method is im- 
plicit, I think, in much that goes by the 
name of Ritualism, which is the attempt 
to make religion more believable and real- 
izable by making it more appealing to the 
physical senses. It is the attempt, when 
rightly interpreted, so it seems to me, to 
cure a worldly materialism by an ecclesias- 
tical materialism. But there is in my 
judgment another and more effective way, 
and that is for the preacher, as the expo- 
nent of religion, to become himself in his 
preaching the expression of a spiritual force, 
and the embodiment of a spiritual life, 



90 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

whose presence thus in the pulpit will 
awaken the spiritual life which is latent in 
those who hear him. This may seem to 
some of you a vague kind of method, but 
it is a real one. Do we not know what it 
is to come into the consciousness of new 
worlds, and the possession of new ideals 
and faiths, by coming into contact with the 
living presences which embody them ? We 
stand before the patriot who has done some 
great unselfish, and patriotic act, and for 
the time at least we believe there is nothing 
more real and more admirable than patriot- 
ism. We stand before the soldier who, 
with a record of courage, of fine and 
splendid courage, has just come home from 
the wars, and for the time at least we be- 
lieve there is nothing so real and admir- 
able as courage. Pure and unalloyed 
goodness, nobleness, unselfishness, or dis- 
interestedness of motive and conduct, — 
perhaps as a rule we do not much believe 
in these things, because as a rule, perhaps, 
we do not much see them. But some 
day we do see them; we stand in their 
presence, we look up into their eyes : they 
speak to us, and we hear them ; they touch 
us, and we feel them; and we bow and 



THE PREACHER AXD HIS MESSAGE 91 

kneel before them, and ask them to give 
their benediction to us. 

Xow, in some such way as that must 
the preacher of Jesus Christ try to bring 
the people to whom he preaches into the 
consciousness of that high and pure ideal 
life which Jesus Christ was, which Jesus 
Christ is. That life must be in his preach- 
ing. And the people to whom he preaches 
must feel it in his preaching, and. coming 
thus into contact with it, they will for a 
time at least believe in the reality of it. 
Ordinarily, and for the most part, they are 
in very close contact with things of a differ- 
ent kind, with material things and affairs, 
and they become so absorbed in those mate- 
rial things and affairs that th.Qj find it hard 
to realize other tilings and affairs. We all 
know, again, what that is. How we can be- 
come so deeply engrossed at times in some 
one line of conduct, or some one line of 
thought, as not to see, or hear, or know 
what is going on about us, — the singing 
of the birds on the trees, the forms of peo- 
ple passing by on the streets, the striking 
of the clock on the stairs : we are not con- 
scious of any of these tilings. They are 
real, and true, and are going on about us, 



92 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

but we are not conscious of them ; we are 
conscious only of that one thing which is 
going on so vehemently and engrossingly 
in us, until by some sharply asserting and 
interruptive influx of life from the world 
which lies outside, that part of our nature 
which had been asleep is quickened and 
awakened in us. So, I say, must the pul- 
pit, in order to have and perform a dis- 
tinctive mission to-day, become somehow 
a power which shall break in upon the 
engrossing secular life of men and women, 
and make them feel and become more 
spiritually alive. That, it seems to me, 
is what people go to church for. They 
want to feel themselves more alive, to 
be lifted up and exalted to some higher 
plane of life. Then with that warmer 
glow of life in them, and from that higher 
plane, they will see and know of them- 
selves what their practical duties are, 
and will have more disposition to perform 
them. 

That kind of preaching, too, as I have 
already said, is authoritative. It authen- 
ticates itself. For whether or not the 
people who hear believe what the preacher 
says, they believe him. They cannot help 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 93 

believing him, and they cannot help feeling 
and responding to him, and he does them 
good and helps them. What did he say? 
Well, they are not quite sure that they 
know what he said. Did he not say such 
and such a tiling, and surely you do not 
mean to tell us you believe that? Yes, 
now that they come to think about it 
they remember he did say that, or some- 
thing like it, and it is true that they do 
not believe it. But then, he believed it. 
Ah, how much he believed it ! How with 
his whole heart, and soul, and mind he 
believed it ! How he seemed to be on fire 
with it ; and it was, they say, the fire they 
perceived, and not the fuel that kindled it. 
They almost forget what the fuel was, — 
at least they did not notice it much at the 
time. 

I am interested in a Rescue Mission in 
New York, and go there at times to speak 
to the men. A poor, forlorn, degraded, 
almost helpless and hopeless, set of men 
they are. They have lost their character, 
they have lost their reputation, they have 
lost their self-respect, they have lost every- 
thing except their souls, or except that 
soul-instinct which, no matter how down- 



94 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

trodden, and buried, and covered up, is 
in every man, and never can be lost. I 
find it very hard to reach and touch those 
men. But there is a little woman who 
goes there sometimes, who was once a 
member of the Salvation Army, and whose 
words have much more power and effect- 
iveness than mine. And to her they 
always listen with a rapt and eager listen- 
ing ; and often, as I have heard her talk, 
have I seen those hard, stolid faces lighten, 
and kindle, and glow, as though from be- 
neath the rubbish their souls were coming 
out ! But not only does she touch and 
move and quicken them, she also touches 
me as very few preachers do. Her theology 
is not mine ; it is in some respects very 
different from mine. Many of the things 
which she says seem to me to be puerile 
and crude ; and when I come to think of 
them afterwards, I am sure I do not believe 
them, and could not believe them. But 
she believes them, and her whole person- 
ality seems to be saturated with them, and 
to quiver and tremble with them ; and the 
earnestness with which she speaks is not 
simulated and feigned, but most intensely 
real. And it is that real, unfeigned, and 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 95 

deep personal earnestness which touches 
me as well as others, and makes me more 
alive. 

Now, I do not wish to be understood 
as saying or implying for a moment that 
it makes but little difference what one 
preaches, if only he believes it very much, 
and is very much in earnest about it. It 
does make a difference, and a very great 
difference. I shall have something to say 
about that in the next lecture. Truth is 
truth always, and is always different from 
error ; and our business is to preach truth, 
and nothing but truth. But the point I 
am making is this : that the distinctive 
power of the pulpit is not the mere preach- 
ing of truth, but truth so preached as to be 
preached in personality ; truth made living, 
made life ; and that even when it is not 
truth that the pulpit preaches, or not truth 
as we apprehend it, it may sometimes, 
and does, become in the pulpit a power, 
and a spiritual power, which awakens a 
spiritual power or a spiritual life in us. Is 
not this the reason why so much of the 
homiletical literature of the past fails to- 
day as we hear it to move or impress us 
much ? It was impressive at the time, but 



96 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

it is not impressive now. It was impres- 
sive to those who heard it, but it is not 
impressive to us who are only able to 
read it. " We are often amazed," says the 
author of a recent " Life of St. Francis," 
" on reading the memoirs of those who 
have been great conquerors of souls, to 
find ourselves remaining cold ; finding in 
them all no trace of animation or origi- 
nality. It is because we have only a life- 
less relic in the hand. The soul is gone. 
The written word can no more give an 
idea of it than it can give an idea of a 
sonata by Beethoven or a painting by 
Rembrandt." Yes, the soul is gone ; and 
that which made it power, so distinctively 
and effectively power, we cannot know 
and feel ; and to us who only read it, it is 
not power. 

I caution you, therefore, young gentle- 
men, against the tendency to introduce 
into your sermons long quotations or ex- 
tracts from the sermons of those who were 
thought, and justly thought in their day, 
to be such eloquent preachers. Eloquent, 
indeed, those passages were when spoken 
by them, because by them they were spoken ; 
and while you can put their words into 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 97 

your speech, you cannot put them into 
your speech; and the only true way to 
imitate or to be like them is to be like them 
in being yourselves. God spoke to them , 
let God speak to you, in, through, and by 
you. Then will your message be, as theirs 
was, a personal message to men ; and you 
will become as eloquent as it is possible for 
you to become. Eveiy man in this world 
is different from every other man ; and 
every preacher is, or ought to be, different 
from every other preacher, and cannot be 
a true and effective preacher unless in 
some respects he is. Copy, therefore, no 
one. Take no one for your model. In 
that way failure lies. " The great man," 
says Emerson, " is the man who reminds 
us of no other man." And the great or 
the greatest preacher is the man who 
reminds us of no other preacher. He may 
preach the same truth which other preach- 
ers preach; and yet, coming through his 
personality, his mind, his soul, his heart, 
he will not see it and feel it exactly as 
others see it and feel it. Nor will he say 
it like them ; and while it is the same, it 
is the same with a difference, and it is that 
difference which cannot be imitated, which 

7 



U8 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

cannot be reproduced, which makes him 
the great preacher that he is. And it is 
just so far, not as we resemble but as we 
do not resemble him, that we too become 
great up to our capacity of greatness. 

This, then, is the substance of what I 
have been trying to say : that in order to 
make our preaching of the Christian Gos- 
pel effective, it must be the Gospel as it 
speaks through us, through our own per- 
sonal knowledge and personal conquest of 
it. And yet how hard it is to have it so 
speak to-day! The truth of the Gospel 
comes to us cut and dried and labelled, 
and as such we take it, and preach it, and 
then so often find, and so often wonder, 
that it does not have, as we preach it, the 
life and power of truth. The reason of it 
is this: that while it is truth, it is not 
life, or not truth alive. We have not made 
it ours, as those who first formulated it 
made it theirs. And it is not easy to make 
it ours, just because it was they, and not 
we, who formulated it. And therefore to 
us it is apt to be only, or chiefly, a formula. 
As a formula we receive it ; as a formula 
we preach it ; and, as a formula, it has no 
power. But perhaps a change is coming. 






THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 99 

God rules in all ages, and is ruling now. 
And in that sceptical and critical thought 
which seems at present to be shaking, if 
not undermining, the traditional faith of 
some, or rather that somnolent acquies- 
cence which has been misnomerecl faith, 
God in His providence may be preparing 
the way for making it again, as once it 
was, a living and personal faith. And 
looking at, and feeling that spirit of ques- 
tion and doubt which is so prevalent now, 
may we not say, with the Pope in Brown- 
ing's "Ring and the Book," — 

" What if it be the mission of this age 
To shake this torpor of assurance from our creed, 
Re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring 
The formidable danger back we drove 
Long ago to the distance and the dark. 
No wild beast prowls now round the infant 

camp; 
We have built wall, and sleep in city safe. 
But if some earthquake try the towers that laugh 
To think they once saw lions rule outside : 
And man stands out again, pale, resolute, pre- 
pared to die, 
Which means, alive at last ! " 

Yes, and the pulpit alive at last; and 
having been made alive by having been 



100 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

made to seek and win again for itself 
" That old faith in the thing grown faith 
in the report," and as a new and personal 
conquest to preach and body it forth. 
Then will it be a power, a unique and dis- 
tinctive power. Then will its word and 
message be a word and message of power. 
Then, even in an un-ideal and materialistic 
age will it draw all men unto it ; for the 
truth which then it will preach will be the 
truth alive. Life will touch and appeal to 
life, and life will respond to life. Men 
will not then be indifferent, cannot then 
be indifferent, to the pulpit's living voice ; 
but listening to that voice, not from a sense 
of duty, but from a sense of need, they will 
be helped and quickened by it. Material 
treasures and joys will still be treasures 
and joys. Men will continue to seek them 
and to find them. But something else will 
they find ; and the living voice of the pul- 
pit will help them to find their souls. A 
new ideal will gradually dawn through the 
agency of the pulpit on an un-ideal age. 
A new ambition through the voice of the 
pulpit will be awakened in it. A new 
light will seem to come, as when the morn- 
ing has followed the night, and the dark- 



THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE 101 

ness been driven away ; as when, over the 
eastern hills — 

" Forth one wavelet, then another, curled, 
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed 
Rose reddened ; and its seething breast 
Flickered in bounds ; grew bold, then overflowed 
the world." 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER 
MESSAGES 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER 

MESSAGES. 

T N his interesting and admirable book on 
" Social Evolution " Mr. Benjamin 
Kidd has shown with great force and 
clearness of statement what a large and 
important factor religion has been in the 
growth and development of society. That 
indeed is the one thing which everywhere 
we see, and which I think hereafter we 
shall continue to see. Those who believe 
that the future will emancipate man from 
religion are poor readers, it seems to me, 
both of the future and of human nature. 
Mr. Herbert Spencer is not generally re- 
garded as a religious apologist; and Mr. 
Herbert Spencer has put himself on record 
as having explicitly stated that as knowl- 
edge grows, and deepens, and widens more 
and more, so will the religious sentiment 
grow ; and that the man of the future, 
more cultivated, more highly developed 



106 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

than now, will be more religious than 
now. 

While, however, all that is true, that 
man is so essentially a religious creature 
and can never get rid of religion, it must 
also be confessed and deprecated as true 
that religion has not diffused itself through- 
out the whole man, throughout the whole 
body of his conduct and thought; and 
that while it has been and still is an 
active force in social growth and develop- 
ment, it might be and ought to be more 
active than it is. There is still too much 
of a break or chasm in man's life. There 
is a lack of unity in it. He is not reli- 
gious always, but only religious at times ; 
and much of his life seems to be, and 
seems to be of necessity, beyond the sphere 
of religion. Now, there is something wrong 
about this ; for religion should touch, and 
pervade, and compass all the life, and not 
simply a part of it. And why does it not ? 
Perhaps we preachers are in a measure 
responsible for it. I think we are ; and 
that in our zealous effort to strengthen 
and establish religion and make its domin- 
ion more, we have in fact narrowed it, and 
made its dominion less. Of course we 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 107 

have not meant to do this, bnt neverthe- 
less we have done it. And how? We 
have drawn the line too sharply between 
the secular and the religious, or rather 
have helped to make an impassable gulf 
between them, so that those who would 
pass from the religious to the secular can- 
not ; neither can they pass to the religious 
who would come from the secular. We 
have made this distinction in the first 
place with reference to truth, and have 
been disposed to teach, or at least to give 
the impression, that what we call religious 
truth is something essentially different 
from what we call secular truth. 

The difference we say is this : religious 
truth is something which God has revealed, 
while secular truth is something which 
man has discovered. Our object in mak- 
ing this distinction is to give to religious 
truth a more authoritative investiture, and 
to make men more disposed to hearken to 
and obey it ; because it is God's truth, the 
truth which God has revealed. In empha- 
sizing, however, the sacredness of the truth 
which we call religious, the truth which is 
in the Bible, we have diminished the sacred- 
ness of all other truth, the truth which is 



108 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

not in the Bible, and have made it some- 
thing secular. In their apprehension, 
therefore, of that other truth, men very 
naturally have become secularized, and 
have not been made to feel that in touch- 
ing that other truth they were touch- 
ing the garment of God, as we touch His 
garment who move within the sphere of 
the truth which God has revealed. They 
are outside of that sphere, we think ; and 
while what they say may be true, it is not 
as true as our truth, and must be subordi- 
nated to our truth, because our truth is 
revealed truth, and theirs is not revealed. 
And so we become jealous of them, and 
they become jealous of us ; and there is 
friction, and irritation, and antagonism 
between us. And we have the singular 
spectacle and the sad one, of men loving 
truth with an earnest and passionate love, 
searching for it, devoted to it, ready, if 
need be, to die for it, as they have died for 
it, and yet standing apart and separate 
from Him whose Kingdom is the king- 
dom of truth, whose weapon is the weapon 
of truth, whose voice is the voice of truth, 
and who said before the governor in the 
judgment hall, " To this end was I born ; 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 109 

for this purpose came I into the world, 
that I should bear witness unto the truth." 
It is, I say, a sad and singular spectacle, 
and one that ought not to be. And why 
is it ? Are not we ourselves in a measure 
responsible for it by making a distinction 
in theory which does not in reality exist ? 
Truth in the Bible is not distinguished 
from truth outside of the Bible by the 
fact that it alone is a revelation of God, 
that it alone is sacred, that it alone is 
religious. That is a wrong distinction. 
All truth is sacred. All truth is religious, 
and it is all a revelation of God. To think 
or teach otherwise is to deny the possibility 
of any revelation at all. It is to deny that 
the truth of the Bible is a revelation of 
God. Or rather it is to deny and destroy 
the only philosophic ground upon which 
we can consistently maintain that it is a 
revelation of God, and to go over at once 
to the enemy, — that positive school of 
thought which declares that God, being 
absolute and infinite, and because infinite 
and absolute, cannot make a revelation of 
Himself to the related and the finite, and 
must forever remain to us unknown and 
unknowable. We, on the other hand, be- 



110 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

lieve that God can reveal himself and 
does reveal Himself, that He is essentially 
a revealing God. That is the crux of all 
our philosophic contentions. Can the Un- 
known Infinite become known to the finite ? 
Can God reveal Himself ? And here, too, 
is the essential difference between the re- 
ligious and the non-religious mind, — one 
believing that God is a revealing God, 
and the other believing that God is not 
a revealing God. 

Whenever, therefore, we teach with 
reference to any body of truth, with refer- 
ence to the truth of the Bible that it alone 
is divine revelation, we fall, with reference 
to all other truth, into the very error which 
we deprecate. We teach by implication, 
as far as that other truth is concerned, pre- 
cisely what non-religion teaches, what Posi- 
tivism teaches, namely, that God is not a 
revealing God, and that that other truth is 
something which man by his own unaided 
effort has discovered, and which, therefore, 
has to be looked at in connection with man, 
as revealing the glory of man, and not as 
something rather which the revealing God, 
working in and through man, has revealed 
to man's apprehension. May we not be- 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 111 

lieve, however, that God was once long ago 
a revealing God, but that He is not now a 
revealing God ? Yes, we may believe it ; 
but to do so is to believe in a changeable 
God, and not in a God who is the same 
yesterday, to-day, and forever, without 
variableness or shadow of turning. And 
if we believe in a changeable God, who is 
not now and always a revealing God, we 
make it difficult to believe that He was 
ever a revealing God ; because we surren- 
der that philosophic first premise by which 
alone we can prove it, namely, that God is 
essentially a revealing God, and substi- 
tute in its place that philosophic first 
premise of the Positive school of thought 
which declares that God is essentially a 
non-revealing God. 

Do not misunderstand me. The truth 
which the Bible contains could not have 
been reached by the unaided faculties of 
man. That of course I believe, and would 
stoutly maintain. But neither, again, 
could the truth which lies outside of the 
Bible. That, too, is divine revelation. 
The method of the revelation may not be 
the same. It may be, if you please, less 
immediate and direct : those are questions 



112 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

which I am not now considering. My 
point is this, that it is divine revelation, 
and must be regarded as such, as the 
logical sequence of that fundamental con- 
viction in which religion finds its raison 
d'etre, that God is essentially a revealing 
God, and that the whole of our human 
nature in its intellectual activities, as well 
as in its moral and spiritual endeavors, is 
quickened by and dependent upon, and 
has its being in this immanent and reveal- 
ing God. What, then, is the difference 
between truth in the Bible and truth 
outside of the Bible ? Not that one is 
revealed and the other not revealed ; they 
are both revealed. Neither is it that one 
is more authoritative than the other ; for 
truth can have no higher authority than 
the fact of its being truth. The differ- 
ence is this : partly, if you please, that 
they are revealed in different ways ; partly 
that they are different kinds of revealed 
truth; and partly, also, that in the Bible 
we have the revealed truth of God moving 
more and more towards a full embodiment, 
and in Jesus Christ made flesh. We see 
it not as theory there, not as an abstract 
principle, we see it there as life. It is 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 113 

clothed in a living soul, in a living form 
and body ; it speaks in a living voice. The 
Word of God is made flesh and glorified 
by an incarnation, saying, not here or 
there, or this or that is truth, but saying, / 
am Truth ; look unto Me ; come unto Me ; 
follow Me. Every one that is of the truth 
heareth My voice. 

But suppose there should be some con- 
flict between the truth within and the 
truth without the Bible ? Why, the very 
asking of the question is the answering of 
it. Truth is truth, and God's truth, and 
God's revealed truth, and can no more be 
in conflict with itself than God can be in 
conflict with Himself. That there is in- 
deed, or may be, a conflict more or less, 
between certain propositions which by the 
different teachers have been put forth as 
truth, I do not of course deny, and in the 
face of facts could not. Those whose busi- 
ness it is to study the truth of God con- 
tained outside of the Bible may be at 
times mistaken in what they say and teach, 
as they have been mistaken ; and we should 
be slow and cautious in accepting what 
they say, because it may not be true ; but 
we should also be slow and cautious in 

8 



114 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

rejecting what they say, because it may be 
true. Let us wait and see : not antago- 
nistically, but sympathetically ; and let us 
be willing that they should go on and do 
their work in their own proper way. And 
what is their way ? It is to put forth at 
times new and tentative hypotheses, not 
as being themselves positive statements of 
truth, but simply as working theories with 
a view to ascertaining how well or ill they 
work. If it is found that they work well, 
and continue to work well, then by that 
well-working they are validated and con- 
firmed. But if it is found that they work 
ill, and continue to work ill, then by that 
ill-working they are invalidated and set 
aside, or changed somewhat and corrected. 
In the mean while, then, I say, let us wait 
and see whether they work well' or whether 
they work ill. And let us give to those 
who are working them a hearty and appre- 
ciative encouragement. Let us cause them 
to understand that we are with them and 
not against them, and that if, as the result 
of their working, their brave and patient 
working, they should at last disclose and 
make known to us some truth not known 
by us before, — then, no matter through 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 115 

what medium it comes to us, no matter 
what surrender of cherished belief it costs 
us, we will submit to it, and bow to it, 
gladly, gratefully, reverently, as the truth 
Avhich our God, our revealing God, has 
through them revealed. 

Above all tilings, let us not seem to put 
ourselves in an attitude of hostility to 
those who are simply trying with an appa- 
rently honest purpose to bring to light 
more and more the hidden things of dark- 
ness, and to find out what is true. Let us 
be careful not to create the impression 
that we are afraid of truth, of any truth, 
and that we are not in full sympathy with 
those who are seeking truth. Let us be 
willing, therefore, to forego the pleasure, 
so appealing to the clerical mind at times, 
of refuting so successfully in the presence 
of sympathetic congregations those vain 
and deluded men of scientific research, 
who remain, alas, so insensible to our 
refutation of them, and still go on with 
their searching. And let them go on with 
their searching. What we hold we believe 
is true ; and because it is true we hold it ; 
and because it is true we teach it. But we 
hold not all the truth. " The first man 



116 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

knew her not perfectly, no more shall the 
last find her out. Her thoughts are more 
than the sea, and her counsels profounder 
than the great deep." There is more yet 
to come ; there is more yet to appear. And 
to all who are honestly trying to make it 
come and appear, the voice of the Christian 
pulpit should be always ready to give and 
speak an encouraging word ; and to claim 
and maintain for them that same liberty 
of prophesying which it claims to-day for 
itself. In the exercise of that liberty they 
may make mistakes, as we do, and go 
wrong; but without the liberty to go 
wrong there can be no liberty to go right ; 
and it is better to run the risk of mistak- 
ing the false for the true, than, by not run- 
ning the risk, to fail to find the true. 

Let us then be willing to give, and to 
let it be understood that we are willing to 
give, the fullest and broadest liberty to all 
those persons to-day who, in spheres out- 
side of the Bible, are trying to find the 
truth. Let that be our attitude towards 
them, — not inimical, but friendly ; not at 
variance with them, but at one with them ; 
believing that through them God can also 
speak, and does at times speak, and that 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 117 

the truth which they utter is not therefore 
secular, but sacred and religious, the truth 
which God reveals. 

Is that then the truth which we as 
Christian ministers are called upon to 
preach ? That does not necessarily follow. 
I should say that as a rule we are not 
called to preach it. Truth, to be sure, is 
one, and not two, or many ; and yet there 
are many kinds, and phases, and forms of 
truth, like the many notes of music, or the 
many hues of color, which, though con- 
nected, are different. The truth of geology 
is in harmony with the truth of astronomy, 
but it is not the same as the truth of as- 
tronomy. Nor does it follow that because 
one teaches geology he should also teach 
astrononry. It rather follows that he should 
not ; and that if he does undertake to 
teach it, he will not teach it well. The 
blade (to use Lord Macaulay's simile) 
which is intended to serve the double 
purpose of a carving-knife and a razor, 
will not carve so well as a knife, nor shave 
so well as a razor ; and the bakery which 
should also be a bank, would be likely to 
make poor bread, and to discount bad 
bills. 



118 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

The tendency of civilized society is a 
tendency towards specialization; and the 
specialized task of the preacher is not to 
try to preach all the truth which God has 
revealed (though it is all true, and God 
has revealed it), but to preach that truth 
which God has revealed in Jesus Christ; 
and the less he has to do with the preach- 
ing of what is called scientific truth, the 
better, I think, will it be both for the 
preaching and the science. His preach- 
ing will be touched or affected more or 
less by that scientific truth. It cannot 
help being affected by it. And more 
or less incidentally and collaterally and 
as a kind of side light it will show it- 
self in his preaching. But he is not, in 
my judgment, and as I interpret his office, 
called upon to preach it, any more than he 
is called upon to preach against it. He is 
called upon chiefly to preach the truth of 
God revealed in Jesus Christ ; and through 
his own personal absorption and assimila- 
tion of it to make that truth a power in 
the lives of those who hear him. That is 
his special task, and that is task enough, — 
hard enough, great enough, sublime enough 
to tax him to the utmost, and to give him 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 119 

employment enough. And yet, while per- 
forming the task of preaching the truth 
of God revealed in Jesus Christ, let him 
not forget that there is other truth, and 
that there are other teachers of truth. Is 
his task sacred? So is theirs. Is his truth 
revealed ? So is theirs. Is he a minister 
of God ? So are they. Is he a prophet of 
God ? So are they. And the work which 
they do is religious work, as the work 
which he does is religious work ; because 
it is not chiefly the work which is done by 
them, but the work which is done by God, 
or done by God through them. And the 
verdict of the heart is a true one, when, 
looking back over the ages and seeing 
the beautiful things which have been 
brought to light by literature and art, 
and the wonderful things which have been 
disclosed by physical or metaphysical and 
philosophic research, and the great results 
and principles which have been evolved in 
the progress and conflict of the nations, 
and the historic march of events, it is 
moved to say as it sees, not what hath man, 
but " what hath God wrought." 

Instead, therefore, of making a distinc- 
tion between sacred truth and secular, let 



120 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

us claim all truth as sacred, because all 
truth is God's, and comes from God, and 
is doing God's work in the world. 

And the claim which we make for truth 
let us also make for life; and teach that 
life, though engaged in secular duties and 
affairs, is still a sacred thing ; and that the 
secular sphere in which it moves is still a 
sacred sphere ; and that the secular work 
which there it does is still a sacred work. 
Jesus Christ is there in that secular sphere, 
or may be there. For what is Jesus Christ ? 
Not merely the name of a person who lived 
on the earth some eighteen or nineteen 
hundred years ago, and then died, and was 
buried, and rose again, and went off some- 
where into some invisible world. Jesus 
Christ is the name of the Life on earth of 
God ; and that Life of God we find upon 
the earth to-day in the hearts and souls of 
men. The image of God is on them, and 
cannot be effaced. The Life of God is in 
them, and cannot be destroyed. And every 
now and then, at unexpected times, and 
in unexpected ways, gleams and flashes 
of it appear in secular things and affairs. 
And the name of that Life of God in the 
hearts and souls of men is Jesus Christ, 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 121 

in whom it fully appeared without let or 
hindrance, without spot or blemish, and of 
whom it was said in consequence, that He 
was the brightness of His Father's glory, 
and the express image of His person. 

Ordinarily, however, men do not feel 
that the life of God is in their secular 
sphere of conduct. Christian men do not 
feel so ; and when they go from the duties 
which they perform in church on Sunday 
to the duties which await them in the office 
or shop on Monday, they seem to them- 
selves to be going away from Jesus Christ, 
from a territory which is religious to a 
territory which is not religious. They may 
be religious in it ; to some extent they are 
religious in it, many of them, perhaps most 
of them. But the territory itself they 
feel is not religious, but common, worldly, 
and secular ; and that they while in it are 
doing common and worldly things. And 
they get into the habit of doing them in 
a common and worldly way, according to 
the way of the territory, according to the 
rules of the territory, which is not a relig- 
ious territory, and whose rules, therefore, 
are not religious rules. The religious 
rules belong only to the religious territory, 



122 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

which is back there, somewhere. They 
were in it for a while on Sunday, or at 
the week-day prayer-meeting; and there, 
indeed, in that religious territory they 
observed religious rules. But out here, 
in the great, broad, busy non-religious 
territory, those religious rules do not work 
or apply, and are not expected to apply. 

And so we have the spectacle of men, 
good and true, observing one kind of rule 
at one time, and another kind of rule 
at another time. On Sunday they are 
religious, and seek first the Kingdom of 
God. That is what Sunday is for. On 
Monday they are worldly, and seek first 
their own kingdom. That is what Mon- 
day is for. On Sunday they believe in 
unselfishness, and altruism is the rule. 
On Monday they believe in selfishness, 
and egoism is the rule. On Sunday they 
believe in trying to win their souls by 
sacrificing themselves. On Monday they 
believe in trying to win the world by sac- 
rificing others. Nor do they think that in 
doing this they are doing anything wrong. 
They are simply living in two territories, 
or going from one territory to another, 
like a person who goes from a monarchy 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 123 

to a republic, and observing in each the 
rules, and laws and manners of each. In 
the religious territory they are religious, 
and conform to religious customs. In the 
worldly territory they are worldly, and 
conform to worldly customs. 

Now, such a conception of religion and 
of religious observance is a very poor one, 
stunted, dwarfed, or abortived; and yet 
it is the conception which so many seem 
to have. Not only do so many laymen 
seem to have it, but so many clergymen; 
and so many lajmien perhaps because so 
many clergymen. Like priest, like people. 
And their preaching shows that they have 
it. They exhort their congregations, for 
instance, not to give so much of their time 
and strength to the world, and the doing 
of things that are worldly, but to give part 
of it to God and to the doing of things 
that are religious. By which the}' mean 
the tilings that are marked and labelled 
religious, that have a religious stamp, a 
religious name upon them, such as teach- 
ing in Sunday-school, or attending the 
weekly prayer-meeting, or the sewing so- 
ciety, or the Dorcas society, or the benev- 
olent society, or the missionary society, — 



124 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

the things that are connected more inti- 
mately with the activities of the church. 
And thus they give the impression that 
religion is a sort of side issue on the earth, 
or a little sphere of conduct and activity 
by itself, and that there is another and 
larger sphere of conduct into which reli- 
gion, and religious laws and rules are not 
expected to enter, or not to enter much; 
and into which, in consequence, they do 
not enter much, and where other laws and 
rules which are not religious, which are 
not the laws and rules of the Kingdom of 
Christ, prevail. 

Now, I believe thoroughly in that kind 
of religious work which is known as 
" church work," or parish work, — Sun- 
day-schools, prayer-meetings, benevolent 
societies, etc. I believe that the Christian 
people in our congregations should take 
hold of that work and help it. That 
surely is religious work, and very impor- 
tant religious work. I shall have some- 
thing to say about that before I finish this 
course of lectures. But there is another 
kind of religious work which seems to me 
to be still more important. I mean the 
work which is done in what is usually des- 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 125 

ignated as the secular sphere of conduct, 
— politics, society, business. And the men 
who are in that so-called secular sphere 
should he made to feel that God is also in 
it, and that they are in it with God and for 
God, who is above all, and through all, 
and in all. They should be made to feel 
that they are in it to do God's work in the 
world, in God's way, according to God's 
rules, as Jesus Christ has revealed them. 
They should be made to feel, therefore, 
that all the activities in which they there 
engage, or the things which there they do, 
are religious things and activities. This 
will make them, not less inclined, but more, 
to participate in and do those other reli- 
gious tilings, those other religious duties, 
such as teaching in Sunday-schools, at- 
tending prayer-meetings, and helping and 
relieving the poor, for which the parish 
stands. Naturally, easily, gladly, will they 
pass from one kind of religious work to 
another kind of religious work. There 
will seem to be no break in it. And if 
3'ou want to get your congregations (when 
the time comes for you to have congrega- 
tions) more interested in the religious work 
which is going on in your parishes, you 



126 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

must first get them to understand (it is a 
difficult thing to do, for it is always a diffi- 
cult thing to get people out of ruts), that 
religious work is something which is going 
on all the time. You must first make them 
realize that in this world which God made 
and owns, there never was meant to be any 
other kind of work except religious work, 
and that the distinction which has been 
made between the religious and the secu- 
lar is a false and misleading distinction. 
First get them to understand that, I say ; 
then your Sunday-schools will be well 
equipped, your prayer-meetings will be 
well attended, your missionary and benev- 
olent societies will prosper and flourish as 
you would have them flourish. Yes, and 
other things will come in time in your par- 
ishes which will also prosper and flourish. 

We hear the fear expressed in some 
quarters to-day that the minister of Jesus 
Christ is giving too much of his time to 
the development in his parish of secular 
works and activities, and is himself in 
danger of becoming secularized. Instead 
of devoting so much of his energy and 
strength to the starting of guilds and clubs, 
— girls' clubs, men's clubs, boys' clubs, — 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 127 

and coffee-houses, and gymnasiums, and 
dispensaries, and kindergartens, and day- 
nurseries, and loan bureaus, and employ- 
ment bureaus, he should, it is said, confine 
himself more strictly to his proper work, 
which is the work of preaching the Gos- 
pel. Now, if this criticism simply means 
that the work of preaching the Gospel is 
for the Christian minister, the first and 
paramount work, then I accept and in- 
dorse it ; for that is what I believe, and 
have already said. And if the doing of 
those other things to which I have referred 
interferes with his preaching, then in my 
judgment he should not try to do them. 
If he cannot do both, let him not try to 
do both, but only to do the one which is 
in importance first. But if the criticism 
means or implies that in doing those things 
in his parish which are commonly called 
secular he is not doing tilings which are in 
reality religious, then it seems to me that 
the criticism is not well taken, and is cal- 
culated to give a conception of religion 
which impoverishes and enfeebles it, and 
makes it so much less, and so much less 
sublime, than what it really is or what 
it was meant to be. For religion, accord- 



128 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

ing to the Christian conception of it, does 
not mean to have the consciousness of God 
in some particular places, or in some par- 
ticular things. That is the pagan concep- 
tion of religion, that God is in places and 
things, — lo here, lo there ! But our reli- 
gion is better and more sublime than that, 
and means to have the consciousness of 
God in all places, and in all things. With 
that consciousness of God all duty is sacred 
duty ; all service is sacred service ; all life 
is sacred life. Wherever we go or are, 
we have the consciousness in us that we 
are standing on holy ground. Whatever 
we try to do, we have the consciousness 
in us that we are doing holy work. And 
even when through parish coffee-houses, 
and clubs, and gymnasiums, we minister 
simply to the bodies of men, we are min- 
istering unto bodies which Jesus Christ 
taught are the temples of the Holy Ghost. 
That, it seems to me, is the conception 
of religion which you and I are to try to 
give to the people of this generation. 
And if in any way Ave can make our 
parishes stand for that and express it, we 
shall be doing something towards the estab- 
lishment on earth of the kingdom of the 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 129 

Son of God. Human life liitherto has 
been too much divided, and cut up into 
fragments and sections. Each of the de- 
partments of knowledge, says Mr. Kidd 
again, which, has dealt with man in society, 
has regarded him almost exclusively from 
its own standpoint. " To the politician he 
he has been the mere opportunist. To the 
historian he has been the unit, which is 
the support of blind forces apparently sub- 
ject to no law. To the exponent of religion 
he has been the creature of another world. 
To the political economist he has been 
little more than a covetous machine. The 
time has come, it would appear, for a bet- 
ter understanding and for a more radical 
method." And that better understanding, 
it seems to me, must come from a better 
understanding of religion, from a concep- 
tion of religion which shall include in its 
synthesis all forms of human conduct and 
ail departments of human activity. It is 
eminently fit and proper, therefore, that 
the minister of Jesus Christ should take an 
active part in all social and political move- 
ments; not merely because he, too, is a 
man and never forfeits his manhood ; but 
because also he is a man of religion, a re- 
9 



130 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

ligious man. And all those social and po- 
litical movements are essentially religions 
movements which tend to establish on the 
earth, or should be so directed as to be made 
to establish, the kingdom of Jesus Christ. 
As long, however, as the minister of Jesus 
Christ has but little to do with them, men 
will continue to feel that those social and 
political movements are not religious move- 
ments, and that the work which they do 
along those different lines is not a religious 
work. And it is just that conception of 
the work of the world, of the real work of 
the world, which we must try to change. 
That great political reformation, it has 
been said, which broke out in Europe 
near the close of the last century, and 
whose influence has extended to these 
western shores, has made the people feel 
that the sovereignty of the world is in 
their hands to~day, and that they indeed 
are the kings. What is needed now, it 
has been also said, is another and greater 
reformation, which shall make the people 
feel that they are priests as well as kings, 
and which shall give to them in their work, 
whatever it may be, and however secular 
it may seem, the consciousness of God and 
the sense of responsibility to Him. 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES lol 

In this way, I think, and only in this 
way, will social antagonism be abated, 
social irritation appeased, and that social 
reformation wrought, which is both needed 
and imminent and which cannot be long 
delayed, when the rich and the poor and 
all, will be made to realize that they are 
priests as well as kings, and are every- 
where doing their work in the world as at 
the altar of God. In that way, too, it 
seems to me all human life on earth is to 
be gathered up into Jesus Christ, — not by 
separating it from the secular sphere, but 
by sending it into the secular sphere with 
the consciousness there of God. When 
Abraham was called by the Divine Spirit 
to leave his native country, he went out, 
we are told, looking for a citj 7 , the symbol 
of secular life, whose builder should be 
God. The men of Shinar and Nineveh 
were building up their cities in selfishness 
and sensuousness. Abraham looked for a 
city whose builder should be God. When 
St. John in the isle of Patmos looked for- 
ward into the future, and saw the eventual 
triumph of the Christian religion on earth, 
he saw that triumph coming to pass, — not 
in the form of a church, in which all men 



132 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

should be doing things technically called 
religious, but in the form of a city, the 
symbol of secular life, a New Jerusalem, 
coming down out of heaven from God, in 
which all men should be doing things tech- 
nically called secular, but doing them with 
the spirit of God as revealed in Jesus 
Christ. 

St. Augustine, at the beginning of the 
fifth century, when the city of Rome by 
reason of its inherent moral corruption, 
was falling into decay, put forth his cele- 
brated work, in which he attempted to 
show that the Christian religion was not 
hostile to the secular life, but that its pur- 
pose was to build a city of God on earth. 
Two cities, he says, began to be upon this 
earth with man, founded by two loves, — 
the one by the love of self even to the de- 
spising of God, whose greatest creation is 
the city of Rome ; the other by the love 
of God even to the despising and sac- 
rificing of self, whose greatest creation 
will be that society, that city, that sphere 
of secular activity whose life has all been 
gathered into Jesus Christ. 

That is the task, young gentlemen, to 
which to-day you are called, of trying to 



THE PREACHER AND OTHER MESSAGES 133 

gather up into Jesus Christ, not some, but 
all human life on earth. I do not know 
any task more noble, more sublime, or 
which appeals more strongly to every true 
and sublime and worthy impulse in you. 
To what vocation greater, can any young 
man devote his talent, his time, his life? 
Touching all pursuits, and including within 
its compass all kinds of social endeavor, 
all phases of moral reform, what field so 
broad, so vast? It is indeed the world, 
and that is the field, the world, in which 
as the ministers of Jesus Christ you are 
called to work. 



THE PREACHER PREPARING HIS 
MESSAGE 

GENERAL PREPARATION 



THE PREACHER PREPARING HIS 
MESSAGE 

GENERAL PREPARATION 

T N venturing to tell you something about 
the preparation for preaching, as I shall 
try to do in this lecture, I must, of course, 
go over the same ground in part which 
you have already gone over, or which you 
are now traversing with your teachers 
here ; and this may seem in me both super- 
fluous and presumptuous. But the purpose 
of this lectureship, as I interpret it, is to 
impart such information as one has been 
able to gather from his own practical min- 
istry, and to supplement the valuable in- 
struction of the school, with the hints and 
helps suggested by an experience outside 
of the school. Assuming that I am right 
in this, let me proceed to tell you some- 
thing about the preparation for preaching. 
There are two kinds of preparation for 
preaching, one general, and the other spe- 
cial. They are both important, and I 



138 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

propose to speak of both. In this lecture, 
however, I shall confine myself to the first. 
Yon remember, perhaps, the story told 
of that eminent preacher after whom this 
lectureship is named, that when upon one 
occasion he was asked how long it had 
taken him to prepare a sermon which he had 
just delivered, he replied, "Forty years." 
I do not know whether the story is true ; 
but it might be. It is substantially true of 
every sermon preached. The time involved 
in the preparation is more than the few 
days which have been devoted to the task, 
and includes within its compass all the 
days on earth which the preacher himself 
has lived. It began, that preparation, when 
the preacher began ; not when he began to 
be a preacher, but when he began to be, or 
rather before he began, It began with his 
ancestors; and he is what he is because 
they were what they were. And the tem- 
perament or the talent which is possessed 
by him he has received from them, or re- 
ceived through them from God. He enters 
upon his task, and he performs his task, 
with a preparation for it which has been 
bestowed upon or given to him by God. 
First of all, then, the person who is ex- 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 139 

pecting to preach should try to be reason- 
ably sure that he has been thus prepared 
by nature or by God. He should try to 
be reasonably sure that God has bestowed 
upon him a fitness for the work. It is not 
every good young man who is called upon 
to be a preacher. Goodness, of course, is 
essential ; and it goes without saying that 
that is a qualification which he should 
possess. But that is a qualification which 
everybody ought to possess for his work in 
life, the layman as well as the clergyman, 
and the layman as much as the clergyman. 
For there are not two kinds of goodness, 
there are not two moral codes, one for those 
who preach, and another for those who hear, 
but the same moral code for both, emanat- 
ing from the same God. If it is the duty 
of the minister to be good after the highest 
type of goodness, — or rather after the 
only type, for there is but one, — so is it 
the duty of the mechanic, the lawyer, the 
man of affairs, the president of the rail- 
road, the president of the bank. But just 
as in the case of the mechanic something 
more than goodness is required, so in the 
case of the preacher is something more re- 
quired. Each of them must have, in order 



140 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

to do his work, or to do it fairly well, some 
aptitude for his work, some gift or fitness 
for it which has been bestowed by nature, 
and that means when rightly interpreted, 
which has been bestowed by God. With- 
out that preparation he will not be success- 
ful, and the work to which he devotes 
himself will not only be ill done, but un- 
comfortably done. He will not rejoice in 
his work ; he will not be happy in it. 

But how can a person know whether or 
not he possesses that kind of preparation? 
How can a person who is contemplating 
the work of the ministry know? He can 
know after he has tried. But how can he 
know before ? He cannot know fully and 
infallibly, " for the fire in the flint shows 
not till it be struck." And yet I think he 
can tell with a reasonable degree of assur- 
ance even before it be struck whether the 
fire is there. Emerson somewhere says, 
not in these words, but in substance, that 
what a person most of all desires to do in 
the world, is as a rule the thing which 
best of all he can do, and ought to try 
to do, and was perhaps intended to do. 
Like so many of Emerson's aphoristic say- 
ings, this one has to be taken, not as un- 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 141 

qualifiedly and as in all cases true, but 
only as measurably true. But it is measur- 
ably true. And of one who is considering 
whether or not he is called to preach the 
Gospel of Christ, whether or not he is fitted 
for that particular work, and has been pre- 
pared and sent of God to do it, I should 
simply ask these questions, or should ask 
him rather to ask them of himself : Is the 
preaching of the Gospel of Christ the thing 
which most of all I desire to do in the 
world? Does it like nothing else appeal 
to and arouse and seem to set me on fire 
with an enthusiasm for it? Does it pos- 
sess for me an attraction which nothing 
else possesses, not because of what in the 
way of personal reward it may be able to 
give me in this world or another, but just 
because of what it seems to be in itself as 
its own sufficient reward? Does it make* 
me feel as I think of it, or see it, and hear it 
done by one who is fitted to do it, that I, 
too, am a preacher, — not perhaps as he is, 
I cannot hope for that, but still that I am 
a preacher, that I ought to be, that I must 
be, and that I cannot rest contented until I 
try to be ? 

I do not say that that is an infallible 



142 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

test, but it is a test. If a person feels with 
reference to the work of preaching in some 
such way as that, then I think he may be 
reasonably sure that God has given him 
that general preparation or fitness for the 
work which first of all he must have, and 
which will enter as a factor, secretly per- 
haps and unconsciously to himself, yet 
vitally and helpfully, into the preparation 
of every sermon which he prepares. 

That is the first requisite in the general 
preparation for preaching ; but it is not all. 
The treasures which God has put in the 
human mind and soul are like the treasures 
which He has put in the ground. They 
are there ; but they are there to be brought 
out. If they are not there, they cannot of 
course be brought out ; but they are there 
as though they were not until they are 
Jbrought out. You cannot make a preacher 
of one who is not born to be a preacher, 
who does not have it in him ; and yet he 
has it in him as though he had it not until 
it has been brought out. And what will 
bring, it out ? The same thing 1 that brings 
the treasure out of the ground. Work will 
bring it out, — hard work, and only hard 
work. In other respects also does the 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 143 

parallel sometimes hold, not always, but 
sometimes, that the better and finer the 
treasure, the harder is the work required. 
Herein, is the saying of Carlyle true, that 
genius means, or is, the capacity for in- 
finite exertion. And the preacher who 
trusts chiefly to his native gifts and endow- 
ments, his quickness of thought, his fluency 
of speech, his readiness with his pen, or his 
facility with his tongue, his poetical tem- 
perament or his oratorical temperament, or 
whatever his gifts may be, without trying 
to train, and discipline, and enrich them by 
patient and persistent study, by the hardest 
kind of hard work, will find sooner or later, 
and sooner rather than later, and his con- 
gregation will also find, that he is preached 
out, and that he has exhausted both himself 
and them. 

Now, that is a kind of general preparation 
for preaching which you are acquiring here. 
That is what you are here for ; but it does 
not end here, it only begins here; and 
hard as your work here may be, it will be 
still harder when you go away from here. 
Every man who succeeds to-day is a hard 
worker. He may not work with worry, 
and he will not work well if he does so 



144 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

work ; but he works with energy. This is 
true of every calling. It is, I think, partic- 
ularly true of the minister's calling to-day. 
Some people have the notion that the only 
day in the week on which the minister is 
very busy is Sunday. I have not found it 
so. Sunday to me has always been the 
easiest day in the week ; and when people 
ask me, as they sometimes do, When are 
you most at leisure ? or, When can we hope 
to find you the most disengaged ? I usually 
say, " On Sunday." I have less to do then 
than on any other day in the week. It is 
true that I preach on Sunday ; and it often 
happens that I preach — though it ought 
not to happen — two or three times on 
Sunday ; but then I don't mind preaching 
when 1 am ready to preach, any more than 
I mind eating my dinner when I am hun- 
gry. But where the labor comes in, is in 
the cooking of the dinner, and in the going 
to market, and the many different markets 
to get the things to cook. That is what 
takes time for the subsequent prandial exer- 
cise, as for the subsequent pulpit exercise. 
Hard, therefore, as your work here may 
be, it must be still harder when you go 
away from here. You must still be stu- 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 145 

dents, and diligent students ; and there are 
three directions which your studies must 
take. You must be students first of the 
Bible. You have not yet exhausted, you 
never will exhaust, the truth of that won- 
derful book, or that wonderful collection 
of books; and the more you study the 
Bible, the more will you be impressed both 
with its wonderfulness and its inexhausti- 
bleness; provided, that is, you study it 
with a fresh and open mind, not taking 
something to it which you already know, 
to be by it confirmed, but ready always to 
find in it, and expecting always to find in 
it, something more than you know, and 
which will add to your knowledge. You 
must study it, too, let me say, not simply 
as a book of yesterday, but as a book of 
to-day ; not simply as a book of facts which 
happened long ago, but as a book of prin- 
ciples rather which are in operation now, 
and which the facts illustrate and suggest. 
This is not always done. Some persons 
study the Bible in the way that Balzac 
makes one of his characters say history 
ought to be studied, not to find "prin- 
ciples, but only events ; not to find laws, 
but only circumstances." That is the 
10 



146 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

way in which some persons study the 
Bible, and the way too in which, judg- 
ing them by their sermons, some preach- 
ers seem to study it. They find in it a 
fact in the history of Abraham, or Moses, 
or Samuel, or David; or an event in the 
history of Israel ; or a circumstance in the 
history of the apostles ; and then they tell 
the people all about that fact, that circum- 
stance, that event ; and the people are not 
much interested in that circumstance or 
that event. Why should they be? It 
happened so long ago, and to people so far 
away, in Jerusalem, or Babylon, or Arabia, 
and has apparently but little to do with 
what is happening now. And they take, I 
say, in consequence, but little interest in 
it; and the interest which they do take is 
a kind of archaic interest, like the interest 
which one takes in old monumental re- 
mains, or the forms of plants and animals 
which have become extinct. Very curious 
things they must have been, and wonder- 
ful, and real and true. And how well the 
preacher describes them ; how eloquently he 
sets them forth; what choice language he 
uses in discoursing to the people about them. 
And yet they are not their things, or do 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 147 

not seem to be theirs, as things which bear 
on them. And while, perhaps, there is in 
his fine discourse about them some little 
practical lesson, or helpful moral drawn, 
it is an incidental or parenthetical lesson, 
or a moral drawn by the way; and the 
things and the events from which the moral 
is drawn do not seem real and near, or 
to be alive now, as they were alive once, 
or to be as true for the people living now 
as for the people living then. 

Now that, it seems to me, is not what 
the Bible is, nor is that the way in which 
to study it. Your aim should be, not sim- 
ply to find archaic facts and historical state- 
ments in it, but beneath those facts and 
statements, whatever they may be, living 
rules and laws, or principles and truths ; 
not true because they are in it, but in it 
because they are true, universally true, 
eternally true, for all times, for all places, 
for all persons, whether they lived long 
ago in Palestine or Arabia, or whether they 
are living now in Connecticut or China. It 
is only in this way that you can make the 
Bible, and the truth which the Bible con- 
tains, a real and living factor in the life of 
the modern world. Of what value will be 



148 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, 
unless you can also show that it is the story 
of men and women now ? Of what value 
will be the story of the call which came to 
Abram in Ur of the Chaldees, unless you 
can also show that it is the same call which 
comes to people now? Or that the word 
which was spoken to Ezekiel, dwelling by 
the Chebar River, is the word which is 
spoken to them, dwelling on the banks of 
the Hudson or the Thames ? Or that the 
message which came to Isaiah in Jerusalem 
or Babylon is the message which comes to 
them in Boston or New York, and a mes- 
sage just as true and just as needed now, 
as it was true and needed then. That mes- 
sage and that word you will not find on 
the surface of the Bible. You must dig 
for it beneath the surface as the miner digs 
for the ore ; and in your attempt to find it, 
like the miner, you will find some local stuff 
and material closely connected with it, but 
which is not it. 

I remark again that you must use your 
imagination in your effort to find it, — a dan- 
gerous weapon and a sharp one, which cuts 
both ways, towards error as well as truth, 
but which, nevertheless, you must use in 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 149 

trying to find in the Bible the living word 
of God. And then when you have found 
it you must give it forth and present it, not 
always in that rhetorical and idiomatic form 
with which it was originally associated and 
which is but the superficial accessory of it, 
but in that form of expression which ap- 
peals to the people now, and which they 
now understand and use. In this way you 
will do what you can to make them see 
and feel that while it is old it is new, the 
word of God to Isaiah, and the word of 
God to them; the message which Ezekiel 
heard, and which they should also hear. 
Study the Bible in that way, with a rever- 
ent imagination, with an open heart and 
mind; trying always to find, not merely 
local facts, but eternal principles in it ; not 
as a book of yesterday, but as a book of 
to-day; not as a book which shows that 
once, long ago, God was near to the world, 
but as a book which shows that He is 
always near to the world. Then it will 
not be necessary for you to be always try- 
ing to prove and vindicate the Bible, try- 
ing to prove to the people that it is the 
word of God, or hoiv it is the word of God. 
It will be the word of God, and will prove 



150 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

itself to be, first to you, and then through 
you to them, quick, powerful, penetrating, 
and profitable for doctrine, reproof, cor- 
rection, instruction in righteousness, that 
righteousness which in the Old Testament 
Scriptures is declared to be eternal, and 
which Israel tried to express, and which in 
the New Testament Scriptures is defined 
as love, and which Jesus Christ embodied. 
And topics will it give you, and subjects 
will it suggest, which will always be fresh, 
and timely, and pertinent to the occasion. 
And topics, too, they will be which you 
will never exhaust, will never reach the 
end of in meaning or in number ; and fast 
and often as the Sundays come you will 
never be preached out. 

But there is still another direction which 
your studies should take. The preacher 
should be a man of broad and generous 
culture, and should study, not only the 
Bible, but books outside of the Bible. 
Those other books will help him to teach 
and interpret the Bible, will help him to 
know the Bible, to understand the Bible, 
and will help him to help the people to 
understand the Bible. And by this I do 
not mean that they will furnish him with 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 151 

facts, and incidents, and stories which he 
will be able to use as illustrations in preach- 
ing, thus making his preaching because 
more pictorial, more interesting and attrac- 
tive. That indeed they will do, and that is 
desirable ; for an apt illustration in preach- 
ing is always helpful. But here let me 
say, in passing, that it must be an illustra- 
tion which is the preacher's own ; not ne- 
cessarily one which he has invented and in 
that sense made his own, but one that he 
has found in the course of his general read- 
ing. There are, I believe, books of illus- 
trations, stories, incidents, and anecdotes 
which are intended to be a kind of homi- 
letical bank, upon which the preacher can 
draw at sight without the usual discount ; 
and there is apt to come a time in the ex- 
perience of every preacher (it usually comes 
very early in his experience) when he is 
tempted to use such books. My advice to 
you is, to let such books alone. Don't buy 
them ; don't borrow them ; don't use them 
at all ; and if you have them, burn them. 
They will not help you in preaching, or the 
help with which they help you, or with 
which they seem to help you, will be spuri- 
ous help ; and the sermon which is adorned 



152 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

with that kind of adornment will be to 
that extent a spurious kind of sermon. It 
will be like those houses of mixed archi- 
tecture which suggest the thought, as we 
look at them, that before they were com- 
pleted the money gave out, and that they 
had in consequence to be finished off with 
a cheap and spurious kind of embellish- 
ment, which, though it is on them and in 
them, is not of them, and which does not 
therefore improve them. 

Illustrations in preaching are good ; but 
they must be illustrations drawn, not from 
books of stories and encyclopaedias of anec- 
dotes, but from that general fund of knowl- 
edge which by his personal study the 
preacher has made his own. Then they 
are good and helpful, and may be legiti- 
mately used. 

But that is not the reason why the 
preacher should be a diligent student of 
books other than books of the Bible : not 
for the purpose of finding illustrations in 
them, but illustration rather of how the 
books of the Bible, or the truths which are 
in those books, seem to touch, and meet, 
and mingle with the truths contained in 
other books, and to be by the truths of 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 153 

those other books illuminated and con- 
firmed. It is only in that way that one 
can really know what the truths of the 
Bible are. You cannot surely know what 
a young man is when you see him only at 
home, under his father's roof, and in his 
father's house, and how he acts and behaves, 
and what he does while there. You must 
see that, but you must see more than that. 
You must see him away from home, and 
living in other places, and moving in other 
spheres, and going forth on journeys, and 
travelling in other paths, and how he acts 
and behaves, and what he does while there. 
So with the truths of the Bible. In order to 
see and know them, you must see and know 
them not only in the Bible, and in their 
Bible home, or in that home of the church 
which the Bible has made to protect them, 
and how they act and work, and what is 
their character there. You must see them 
away from home, in history, and govern- 
ment, and politics, in social affairs, in com- 
mercial affairs, in the affairs of yesterday 
and in the affairs of to-clay, and how in 
those affairs they energize and work, and 
what is there their influence, and what is 
there their fruit, and how all life on earth, 



154 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

individual and national, is strengthened 
where they are, and weakened where they 
are not. And thus by seeing how well, 
how admirably they work, how admirably 
they behave, not only in their home, their 
venerable Bible home or their ecclesiastical 
home, but also away from home, when 
brought to the test of experience in the life 
of the world at large, — by seeing them 
there, I say, you will apprehend them better, 
you will appreciate them better, you will 
acquire new confidence in them, and hold 
them with firmer grasp. 

Then, again, you will find in the books 
outside of the Bible new and unexpected 
applications made of the truths which are 
in the Bible. You will see them in a new 
perspective, or under a new sky, or through 
the medium of a new light; heights and 
depths will be disclosed, and vistas made 
to appear which otherwise would be ob- 
scured and unapprehended by you. The 
truths which are in the Bible will seem to 
be born again, to have within them a life, 
to have within them a power, which you 
never dreamed that they had. Trains of 
thought will be started, and suggestions 
will be awakened, and beauties will be 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 155 

revealed, and visions will be unfolded, 
which will come to your soul at times 
with a great and glad surprise. There will 
be in your preaching a freshness which will 
make it more interesting both to you and 
to those who hear you. You will preach 
old truths, but not in old ruts, and the 
doctrines will seem new set, and to have 
new meanings in them. So much depends, 
you know, not only in physical vision, 
but also in mental and moral, upon the 
point of view. And the knowledge which 
you acquire outside of the Bible will not 
be other knowledge than the Bible, but 
other knowledge of it, and will give new 
points of view from which to see the Bible. 
Or, again, so much depends for the devel- 
opment of life upon the atmosphere, and 
things which seem to be dead and to have 
no life at all in one kind of atmosphere, 
are energized and quickened and vitalized 
in another. And your studies outside of 
the Bible will give a new atmosphere to the 
Bible ; and in that new atmosphere many 
of the germinal truths which are in the 
Bible, and which to you are in it as though 
they were not in it, will open, and expand, 
and grow, and yield new blossom and fruit, 



156 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

and become to you alive, and will make 
your preaching alive. 

Is not that the reason, or one of the 
reasons at least, why the pulpit to-day is 
sometimes heavy and dull ? It is learned 
enough, and scholarly enough, but it is too 
exclusively a theological scholarship, or an 
ecclesiastical learning. And would it not 
make the pulpit more attractive and edify- 
ing if it had around it more of the atmos- 
phere of another kind of learning, with a 
view to giving it a deeper and livelier 
insight into the word of God, and making 
it see some finer and better meanings in 
that word of God? We sometimes hear 
it said that what is needed in preaching to- 
day is not that it should be more eloquent 
and learned, but more expository and scrip- 
tural; that it should be more closely con- 
fined to the preaching of the Gospel of 
Christ. And that I believe is true. The 
people who go to church to-day go there to 
be helped. They have been working hard 
all week long, and they want to hear some- 
thing that shall strengthen, and refresh, 
and inspire them, and lift them up towards 
a better and purer life. They have been 
listening to the words of man, which are 



PREPARING HIS M ESS AGE 157 

not always inspiring words, and now they 
want to listen to the word of God for 
a while, and lay hold on eternal life, and 
to tonch as it were the hem of the garment 
of Jesus Christ. And that will be the best 
and most helpful kind of preaching which 
will enable them to do it. 

Let your preaching, then, be expository 
and Scriptural, the preaching of the Gospel 
of Christ. And in order that it may be 
that, study the Bible. And in order that 
you may know better what the Bible is, do 
not confine yourselves in your study of the 
Bible to the study of the Bible itself, or 
to the study of books and commentaries 
written upon the Bible. Begin there, but 
do not stop there. Study the Bible through 
books which are not themselves biblical, 
— through history, and philosophy, and 
poetry, and science, and fiction, — and jow 
will understand better what the Bible is, 
and also what is in it, and will be able 
better to bring it out, and better to enforce 
and apply it. 

What particular course or method you 
should adopt in traversing that field of 
literature which lies outside of the Bible, 
it is for you to determine ; only do not 



158 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

neglect it, or think that in studying it you 
are neglecting the Bible. You are, on the 
contrary, studying the Bible, and getting 
ready to preach it, not only more attrac- 
tively, but more effectively as well. 

But there is still another direction which 
your studies must take. You must be 
students of human life ; not simply as it 
was yesterday, but as it is to-day. The 
story is told of a theological instructor in 
one of our seminaries, whether true or not 
I know not, and it matters not, that he was 
in the habit of saying to his pupils in his 
closing lecture to them, " Three things are 
necessary, young gentlemen, to success in 
the ministry, — grace, learning, and com- 
mon sense. If you have not grace, God can 
give it to you. If you have not learning, 
man can give it to you. But if you have 
not common sense, neither God nor man 
can give it to you." His purpose I pre- 
sume was to impress upon them, not so 
much the hopelessness in certain cases of 
acquiring common sense, but the desirable- 
ness of acquiring it in all cases. And surely 
it is desirable, not only in a layman, but also 
in a clergyman. He cannot get on without 
it, or cannot get on well ; and the only way 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 159 

in which he can succeed in acquiring it is 
by coming into touch with life, — the life of 
the people about him, their real and actual 
life, seeing it, feeling it, studying it, and 
learning thus what it is by personal con- 
tact with it, and how to guide and direct 
it. That is a quality which the preacher, 
which the minister of Jesus Christ, like 
every one else, must have, and without 
which his preaching, however learned and 
eloquent, will not be effective preaching. 
And yet, while the Christian minister needs 
it just as much, it is, I think, for him more 
difficult to acquire. He is so fenced about 
with conventional limitations and forms 
that he cannot come near to the people, 
nor can the people come near to him ; and 
it is not easy for him to see them as they 
are. He cannot do what other people 
do, and go where other people go. He 
lives and moves and acts as a different be- 
ing among them. His pursuits are differ- 
ent ; his pleasures are different ; his habits 
of life are different; even his clothes are 
different. He is a different being among 
them, and they meet him in consequence 
in a different way, with a different kind of 
speech, with a different kind of conduct, 



160 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

and with reference to him they are, or at 
least are apt to be, a different kind of 
people from what they usually are. And 
so I say it is hard to get acquainted with 
them, to know them, to understand them. 
His office makes it hard ; and that knowl- 
edge of human life which he ought to have, 
which he ought to acquire in order to be 
able to discharge the duties of his office, 
his office does so often prevent him from 
acquiring. 

How is this difficulty to be met and over- 
come ? I would not willingly say a word 
which would tend in the least to disparage 
or depreciate the ministerial office, to lower 
it, to cheapen it, or to detract from the 
dignity of it. It is, in my judgment, the 
noblest and highest of all offices, as I have 
been trying to make you feel ; and in every 
proper and lawful way I would magnify it 
and proclaim its worth and value, and set 
its dignity and greatness forth. And yet 
I cannot but think it is a great mistake to 
so regard that office as to make it like a 
fence, and a high fence, and difficult to get 
over, between the man on one side, and his 
fellow men on the other. They should not 
so regard it, and lie should not so regard it. 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 161 

Let him go among them rather, and live 
and be among them, simply as a man among 
men, as an honorable and high-minded man, 
living like other honorable and high-minded 
men, trying thus to win their confidence, 
and to secure and have their respect, not 
chiefly because of his office, but chiefly be- 
cause of himself. And if there is to be a 
difference between them, let it be a differ- 
ence in manhood and character, and not in 
official status. Let it be a difference which 
attracts and binds them more closely to 
him, and not a difference which repels and 
puts them further away. 

But the minister, it is said, is often pre- 
vented from doing what other people do, 
innocent though it be, because it is his duty 
to set an example to them. In one sense 
that is true. The minister of Jesus Christ 
should set an example to men ; but it should 
be a real example, and not to any extent a 
feigned and simulated example. It should 
not be an example simply for the sake of 
example ; for the person, whether minister 
or layman, who aims to be an example, 
simply for the sake of example, will sooner 
or later, and inevitably and in spite of 
himself, become more or less of a hypocrite. 
11 



162 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

The example which he sets will not be the 
example of one who is doing what is 
right for its own sake, regardless of conse- 
quence, but the example of one who is 
doing what is right chiefly or in part for 
the sake of others, and solicitous of con- 
sequence ; and the example which he sets 
will not be a good example. It will have 
more or less of the element of dissimula- 
tion in it, which people will be quick to per- 
ceive. It will not be a genuine example ; 
it will not be a wholesome example ; and 
the influence which it exerts will not be 
a wholesome influence. Let the minister, 
I say, be a man among men ; not careless, 
not lax, not indifferent, but at the same 
time not afraid of what they say or think, 
and not anxious about it. Let him go and 
be among them, not thinking much or at all 
of the impression he makes upon them, but 
only of what is right, and careful only for 
that, — honest, fearless, straightforward, 
and scorning consequence. Whitcomb 
Riley has described him, — 

" The kind of man for yon and me, 
He faces the world unflinchingly ; 
And smites as long as the wrong resists 
With a knuckled faith, and force-like fists. 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 163 

He lives the life he is preaching of, 

And loves where most there is need of love. 

And feeling still with a faith half glad 
That the bad are as good as the good are bad, 
He strikes straight out for the right : and he 
Is the kind of man for you and me." 

That is the kind of man who will know 
men. That is the kind of minister who 
will know men, and how to direct, and 
lead, and be an example to them, because 
he is of and among them, in sympathy 
with all that is natural, with all that is 
human in them. He will not be worldly, 
but he will understand the world. He 
will not be a participant in wrong-doing, 
but he will know what wrong-doing is ; 
and to the wrong-doer he will know how 
to speak a strong and searching word. 
Separate from evil as his Master was, but 
not separate from man, as his Master was 
not, like his Master he will know what is 
in man, and something of his Master's 
power he will be able to exert. Go among 
men, therefore, and live among them, and 
see and learn how they live and what their 
habits are, their frailties, their temptations, 
their sins. Do not let your office be a bar- 



164 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

rier between you and them, but an open 
door rather that leads into their midst. 
That is what your pastoral visiting should 
be, not simply a process of running about 
and placating people, and persuading them 
to come to church. It has always seemed 
to me as though there were something un- 
manly and undignified in that. It should 
be an opportunity, rather, to read and 
study new pages, or to read and study new 
chapters in the book of human life, as you 
see it in the homes and families which you 
visit. Often will you find in that book 
of life, not only new subjects for sermons, 
but new and better ways for the preparing 
and preaching of sermons. But not only 
through pastoral visiting should you seek 
that opportunity : seek it everywhere ; for 
if you are to preach to men, you must know 
them ; and if you are to know them, you 
must be more or less among them. You 
must not be afraid of hurting or contami- 
nating yourselves, or your character, or 
your reputation ; it is not your business to 
be afraid. It is your business to know and 
minister to human life with the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ, to know its needs and perils, 
its struggles, its privations, its hardships. 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 165 

not in a general way as you learn about it 
from books, but in a particular way as you 
learn about it and know it from your 
personal knowledge of it. That is your 
business ; and in the performance of that 
business I say you must not be afraid ; and 
if you are the kind of man that a minister 
ought to be, with high and noble aim, with 
pure, lofty, and unselfish purpose, you 
need not be afraid. No harm will come to 
you, or your character, or your reputation, 
but much that is good will come. 

Here is the advantage of that kind of 
work in your parishes of which I have 
spoken in a previous lecture, and which is 
usually designated as " secular " work. It 
will at least give you a better and truer 
knowledge of human life and nature, and 
how it thinks and feels, and what it really 
is ; and you will know better how to 
preach the Christian Gospel to it. There 
will be in your sermons a straightness, 
a downrightness, a directness which other- 
wise they will not or cannot so easily 
have. 

By every means in your power, then, seek 
to know the human life about you, and to 
which you are called to preach. How in- 



166 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

teresting it is ; how suggestive ; how much 
it needs preaching ; and how much to-day, 
if you know it, you can by your preaching 
help it. Study not only books, study not 
only the Bible, but study human life ; and 
the aptitude for preaching which God has 
bestowed upon you, you will thus unfold 
and develop, and be better prepared to use 
for the glory of God in the world, and the 
good of man in the world. 



THE PREACHER PREPARING HIS 
MESSAGE 

SPECIAL PREPAKATION 



THE PREACHER PREPARING HIS 
MESSAGE 

SPECIAL PKEPARATION 

T N the last lecture I spoke to you of the 
general preparation for preaching. My 
purpose now is to supplement what I then 
said, and to speak of the special preparation 
for preaching, of the preparation, that is, 
which one should make for preaching, say, 
next Sunday. That is Avhat next Sunday 
he will have to do. How shall he do it? 
How shall he get ready to do it? How, 
in other words, shall he best prepare him- 
self for the task which then awaits him? 
That is the question which I will ask you 
now to consider, and upon which I will 
venture to offer some suggestions. Before 
doing so, however, let me say that I recog- 
nize the fact that what is valuable for one 
may not be equally so for all; and that 
every person must work out his own 
preaching and his own method of preach- 
ing as he must work out his own salvation, 



170 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

and learn and determine for himself what 
for himself is best. And yet while that is 
trne, it is also true that he may learn some- 
thing from the experiences of others. And 
if the little that I have learned by a practi- 
cal experience for myself shall be the means 
of helping you to learn a little for your- 
selves, it is all I hope to accomplish. 

With this prefatory remark, let me pro- 
ceed to consider, with you, the question, 
" How shall a person prepare himself for 
the immediate duty of preaching ? " 

Observe, I do not say, " How shall he 
prepare his sermon ? " That is a different 
question. To prepare a sermon is one 
thing, and to prepare to preach is another ; 
and the preparation involved is a different 
kind of preparation. It is in this latter case 
both more comprehensive and more per- 
sonal : more comprehensive, because more 
personal ; and the whole personality of the 
preacher in all its varied make-up enters 
into the task. It is not simply a process 
of thinking and writing, but a process of 
living and being, as well as thinking and 
writing, and involves not only the exercise 
of the mind, but the exercise of the soul, 
the conscience, the heart, the body, — yes, 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 171 

even the body; and the preacher himself 
is a factor in his preparation to preach. 
That is what the preacher is called upon to 
do, — not to prepare sermons, but to pre- 
pare to preach ; to prepare himself to 
preach. And how shall he do it? He 
must have, in the first place, something to 
preach about. He must have a subject. 
And how shall he find a subject? Will 
anything do ? No ; anything will not do. 
He must have something which, at that 
particular time is particularly appealing to 
him. It is not necessary that it should be 
suggested by his own personal experience : 
it may be suggested to him by the experi- 
ence of others ; by the need of the congre- 
gation to which he is called to minister ; 
or by the need of the community in which 
he is called to live, — by a book, by a visit, 
by a conversation, by a circumstance of 
recent occurrence, by an event of recent 
happening. There are scores of ways in 
which it may be suggested to Mm. But it 
must be something which when it is sug- 
gested appeals to and takes hold of him, 
and becomes for the time a part of him, 
and makes him feel that that is what he 
must surely preach about next Sunday. 



172 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

But suppose the days go by and no such 
subject comes. Sunday is coming. There 
is no doubt about that ; and he must be 
ready to preach when it does come ; and 
yet no living theme, no timely theme and 
appealing, has been suggested to him. 
Will not that sometimes be the case ? Yes, 
it will ; but it ought not to be the case 
very often, and will not be very often if he 
has been diligent in making that general 
preparation to which I referred in the last 
lecture. I said then, you remember, that 
he should be a diligent student both of the 
Bible and of books outside of the Bible. I 
add now that while he should not study 
with an immediate view to preaching, he 
should not forget in his studying that he is 
a preacher. By this I mean that he should 
have in the course of his studying, not only 
the scholar's temper seeking knowledge for 
its own sake and apart from its practical 
value, but something also of the homileti- 
cal temper. He should have, in other 
words, a mind that is open towards ser- 
mons or towards the suggestion of sermons ; 
and as from time to time subjects are sug- 
gested he should make a note of them, not 
in his memory merely, where they will fade, 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 173 

but in a book, where they will not fade. 
He should have such a book, or a number 
of such books, beside him on his table 
while he is studying, in which he can 
write down, not too fully nor at too great 
length, — that would be interruptive and 
tedious, — but fully enough to subse- 
quently recall the subjects suggested for 
sermons, and making at the time a hasty 
outline of them. Then, when he is at a loss 
to know what to preach about, let him go 
and consult those books, those books of 
sermon stuff, not of somebody's else ser- 
mon stuff, but of his own sermon stuff, or 
sermon thought and outline. Presently he 
will observe that his divining-rod begins 
to dip; there is something there which 
attracts him, to which he seems to be 
drawn. He has not fully found it yet, but 
he is finding it. His sympathies are moved, 
and he yearns towards it. The blood be- 
gins to go up into the brain, or the wheels 
begin to go round, and it will not be long 
before he has his subject, or his subject 
has him, and takes possession of him; 
and he will clearly see and know, without 
any misgiving, what to preach about next 
Sunday. 



174 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

Let me advise you, then, in your study- 
ing, your reading, or your thinking, to have 
such books beside you, to catch and hold 
your thoughts, and to catch them just as 
they come, and to hold them just as you 
catch them, without making an effort to 
group or arrange them in an Index Rerum, 
or according to the letters of the alphabet, 
or with any sort of systematic classifica- 
tion, — that will be burdensome, and will 
take up too much time, — but just for the 
purpose of not losing them, and so that you 
can get them again when you want them. 
I have quite a pile of such books in my 
library (pardon this allusion to myself ; but 
I must be more or less autobiographical in 
these lectures, and am, I presume, expected 
to be), and I find them very helpful ; and 
when I do not know what to preach about, 
I turn over the pages of those books. It is 
like pouring a dipper of water down the 
pump when it is dry and does not work : 
it fetches the water, and the static fluid in 
the quiescent pump is started and begins 
to flow. I find them, I say, very helpful ; 
and so, I think, would you find them, — not 
my books but yours; and if throughout 
your ministry you make it a practice to 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 175 

keep such homiletical notebooks, you will 
not experience much difficulty in finding 
subjects for sermons ; for the preacher who 
has by his side these suggestive aids will 
generally have suggested to him something 
to preach about. 

But suppose even that fails, — and the 
best devices do fail sometimes, — what then 
shall he do, and how then shall he proceed ? 
Sunday is coming, is drawing near, and he 
must be ready to preach ; and yet he has no 
word, he has no message to preach. His 
mind is a blank ; he has turned over the 
pages of his notebooks, and nothing seems 
to appeal to him, nothing seems to take 
hold of him, and his mind is still a blank. 
What shall he do ? Let him leave his books 
for a while, and try to forget all about them, 
and put on his hat and go out, — not for 
physical exercise, though that, perhaps, will 
help him, but for human exercise, for the 
exercise of his heart, his soul, his mind, in 
the midst of human life. If he is living 
in a city like New York, let him go down 
into the tenement houses, and put himself 
into new and sympathetic touch with that 
form of life which there he will see and 
find, — its patience, its courage, its endur- 



176 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

ance ; or its misery and its degradation, 
and which there afresh he will feel. Or 
let him go into the business houses, into 
the counting-houses and the dwelling- 
houses ; and whether living in some metro- 
politan centre or in some country village, 
let him go where the people are, where 
they toil at their tasks, their common 
every-day tasks, and where they carry their 
burdens, their hard and heavy burdens, 
and break and fall beneath them ! Let 
him study and learn their ambitions; let 
him see and know their sorrows ; let him 
hear their cries of distress, their hopes, 
their fears, their shames, their wrongs, or 
their wrong-doings ; let him feel the full 
pulse of their life, — and he will presently 
have and feel some subject on which he 
can preach, some subject on which he 
must preach. 

His biographer has said of St. Francis, 
the eloquent and gifted preacher of the 
Middle Ages, that he felt himself the man 
in whose body were born all the efforts, 
the desires, and the aspirations of men, 
with whom, in whom, through whom, they 
were yearning to be renewed and to be 
born again, and that in that respect, more 



PREPARING BIS MESSAGE 177 

than by any external imitation, he was to 
them a Christ. And the preacher who, 
like St. Francis or like St. Francis' Mas- 
ter, goes out among the people, and by his 
sympathy with them embodies them in 
himself, will not be lacking of subjects on 
which to preach to the people. 

If, then, the books in his library do not 
give him the theme, let him leave his 
books for a time and go out, and try to 
study the book of human life, and he will 
surely find a theme. 

Assuming now that he has found it, how 
shall he prepare himself to preach on it ? 
What shall be his method of preparation ? 
That will depend somewhat, will depend a 
good deal, upon his method of preaching. 
If it is his habit to preach with notes or 
from manuscript, he will not go to work to 
prepare himself to preach in the same way 
or fashion in which he will go to work if 
it is his habit to preach without notes. 
And here, perhaps, I should say something, 
as I presume most of my predecessors in 
this lectureship have said something, in 
regard to these different methods of preach- 
ing. My own practice is to preach with- 
out notes ; and of course I prefer that 

12 



178 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

practice, otherwise I should not practice it. 
It has proved itself for me to be the better 
way ; though I am far from saying that it 
is the better way for everybody. I am 
satisfied, however, after having tried both 
ways, that preaching without notes is the 
better way for me. I can in that way put 
myself more fully into my preaching ; and 
however it may seem to the people who 
hear me, it seems to me, at least, as though 
I came in that way nearer to the people, 
and could speak with greater freedom and 
more directness to them. A manuscript 
fetters and binds me, and I seem when 
speaking from it, to be speaking also to it. 
It gets in my way, and I become impatient 
of it, and I long to push it aside and look 
away from it, and not to look back at it 
again, but to continue to look at the peo- 
ple ; and every time I do look back at it 
again, I feel as though something had 
come between us, and broken the current 
between us. And something has come 
between us, — the manuscript has come 
between us; and I experience then the 
truth of what Dr. Storrs says, that paper 
is a non-conductor, and does not easily let 
the electric current go through. I am 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 179 

sure, then, that for me, preaching without 
notes is the better way to preach; and 
while I am not sure that it would be the 
better way for all, I am sure that there 
are many who would find it the better 
way if once they had the courage to try 
it, and the persistency to keep on trying. 

You will pardon me again if, with the 
hope of persuading and encouraging some 
of you to try it, I refer to my own expe- 
rience, and tell you how I was induced to 
try it myself. I had been in the ministry 
several years before I was led to attempt 
it, and during that time I wrote my ser- 
mons fully out, and preached them as I 
wrote them. I was not satisfied, however, 
with that way of preaching, and was al- 
ways restive under it. I wanted to preach 
in some other way. I wanted to preach 
without notes; and occasionally I did at 
the second service on Sunday, when the 
congregation was smaller, or at the week- 
day lecture. But to go up into the pulpit 
Sunday morning when all the people were 
present and to preach without notes, — I was 
horribly afraid, and had not the courage to 
attempt it. Upon one occasion, however, 
just after I had come back from my sum- 



180 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

mer's vacation, I preached, as usual, a writ- 
ten sermon which seemed so exceptionally 
poor (I think one always preaches his poor- 
est when he has been out of it for a while) 
that I said to myself, I remember, "Now 
is a good time to try to preach without 
notes, for you certainly cannot do worse 
next Sunday morning without notes than 
you did last Sunday morning with them." 
I therefore resolved to try, and with a good 
deal of trepidation I did try. I selected 
as my text, " Forgetting the things which 
are behind, and reaching forth unto the 
things which are before, I press towards 
the mark ; " and while of course I did not 
allude to the fact that that was just what 
I myself was doing at that moment, I had 
the consciousness of it, — the consciousness 
that I was at that moment practising what 
I was preaching, and trying to do in my 
way what I was telling the people to do in 
theirs. That consciousness helped me a 
little, and enabled me to get through bet- 
ter perhaps than otherwise I should have 
got through, and some of my vestry came 
into the vestry room afterwards and quoted 
my text at me, " Forget the things which 
are behind." At all events, I did get 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 181 

through, and I am glad I did ; for it en- 
couraged me to try it again, and I did try 
it again, and again. I have been trying it 
ever since ; and although I have preached 
many poor sermons since, — it is now fif- 
teen years ago, — the poorest of them have 
been the sermons which I have written. 

Having made bold to say this much 
about my experience in preaching without 
notes, perhaps I should go on and say a 
little more and tell you something about 
my method of preparation. After I have 
found my subject I go to work, of course, 
to think about and develop it, and I do my 
thinking about it to some extent in words. 
I think with a pencil in my hand ; and many 
of the thoughts as they come to me I try to 
express on paper, especially if when they 
come to me they are not very clear. I try 
to make them clear by putting them into 
words and giving expression to them ; and 
while I do not memorise that expression, I 
find that in preaching it often comes to me 
easily, naturally, and without any effort on 
my part to recall it. It is simply an in- 
stance of the mnemonic aid that is furnished 
by clear thinking. That, however, is but 
an incidental result, and my purpose in 



182 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

writing, as far as I do write, is simply to 
make sure that I apprehend with distinct- 
ness the thought that is in my mind. I 
want to make sure that I have it, and not 
that I merely seem to have it ; and the only 
way sometimes in which I can make sure 
that I have it is to try to write it. And 
so I go through with my subject, writing 
a little every now and then, sometimes 
more, sometimes less, as the subject seems 
to require, not for the sake of the writing, 
or because I expect to use it in preaching, 
for I do not, but for the sake of the thinking, 
and the clearness of the thinking. Then, 
when I have got through with the subject, 
— no, I never get through with it until I 
preach it — it is in my mind to some extent 
all the time, not only when in my study, 
but at other times ; I live with it more or 
less throughout the week, and it grows and 
develops in me, and becomes a part of me, 
and more and more I have it, or more and 
more it has me. And when Sunday morn- 
ing comes, or Saturday afternoon or even- 
ing, I look over the notes or the writings, 
many or few, which I found it helpful to 
make in the tracing out or the clearing up 
of some of the thoughts of the sermon, in 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 183 

order to be sure that I have them, and then, 
without taking them with me, as best I 
can, I preach. I do not even take the 
heads or outlines with me into the pulpit ; 
I take nothing with me but the text. I 
tried the other plan at first, but it did not 
work well ; it hindered me almost as much 
as a manuscript did. I cannot tell exactly 
how or why it hindered me, but it did. It 
was, I presume, like trying to swim by 
having all the time one foot on the bottom, 
or one hand on a board ; and I found that 
the better way, if ever I was going to learn 
to swim, was just to jump right in and 
swim — or sink. At all events, I did jump 
in, without anything to depend upon, and 
after a fashion, — perhaps not a very good 
fashion, but still after a fashion, — I have 
been swimming ever since, or preaching 
ever since without manuscript. I do not 
call it extemporaneous preaching, or mem- 
oriter preaching, — it certainly is not that, 
or not consciously that. I am not particular 
to call it anything except preaching with- 
out notes ; and poor as the preaching may 
be, it is the best that I can do ; and my 
reason as well as my excuse for referring 
to it now is to encourage some of you to 



184 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

try it, if you care to try. If you want to 
do it, I am sure, from my own experience, 
you can do it ; for I was not, and am not 
naturally fluent in speech, nor do I possess 
the faculty above the average of thinking 
on my feet ; and the little power in that 
direction which at present I possess, I have 
acquired by practice ; and what I have 
learned to do a little, I am sure that most 
of you can learn to do better and more. 
Let me add, however, this word of caution. 
To prepare to preach without notes is a 
much more difficult process than to pre- 
pare to preach with them. If you adopt 
the former method simply as a makeshift, 
and with a view to finding it easier and 
less exacting, you will surely fail, as you 
surely ought to fail. But if, on the other 
hand, you address yourselves to the task 
with earnestness, and thoroughness, and 
persistency, with that faith in the truth of 
your message which you ought to have, and 
with that due faith in yourselves, which 
is, after all, but faith in the God who 
made you, you will not fail. Your rhetoric 
may not always be the best, nor your 
language always the choicest, and yet 
sometimes it will be ; and it is quite likely 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 185 

that you will hesitate at times, and be at a 
loss for a word, and become a little in- 
volved. But if it does not matter much 
to you, it will not matter much to the peo- 
ple, and if you are not confused by it 
they will not be confused ; and your mes- 
sage, though broken in form a little, nor 
always to your satisfaction when you come 
to review it from a literary point of view, 
will have, in spite of its ruggedness, and 
sometimes because of its ruggedness, an 
impressiveness and a power which it 
would not otherwise have. 

One other thing let me say about this 
method of preaching, in answer to an ob- 
jection which is sometimes made against 
it. Suppose, when the time comes to preach, 
the preacher himself is not in good phys- 
ical condition ; the nerve force is scant 
and weak, scintillating sparks of pain, and 
he has what is usually called a nervous 
headache ; or he is in some other way, and 
for some other reason, physically below par 
and not quite up to the mark. Will not 
this make it more difficult for him to 
preach without notes ? Surely it will. But 
it will also make it more difficult for him to 
preach with notes. It will make it more 



186 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

difficult for him to preach at all ; and per- 
haps in such a case he ought not to preach. 
But if he is not too sick to preach from 
manuscript, he is not too sick to preach 
without manuscript; and the conscious- 
ness that he has no manuscript to depend 
upon will sometimes have the effect to im- 
prove his physical condition, and put him 
in better physical form. I, at least, have 
often found it so; and in an experience 
of fifteen years, in which I have had my 
physical ups and downs, like other people, 
whenever I have been well enough to 
preach at all, I have been well enough to 
preach without manuscript. 

But whatever method of preaching you 
may adopt, whether with notes or without 
them, let me remind you again that there is 
a difference between preparing sermons and 
preparing yourselves to preach ; and that it 
is this latter task which you are called to 
perform. You may, if you choose, write 
your sermons, but you must do something 
more than write them. You must write 
yourselves into your sermons, or must write 
the in into yourselves. You must manage 
somehow to make the sermon which you 
prepare, the expression of what you are, or 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 187 

of what throughout the week you have 
been, not only thinking, but acting, doing, 
living ; it must be as it were to your peo- 
ple your weekly story or epic. The mes- 
sage which you have heard, it must be, and 
not only heard but obeyed. The lesson 
which you have learned, it must be, and 
not only learned but practised. The ideal 
which you have seen, it must be, and not 
only seen but embodied and realized and 
become. Not merely some truth of God 
must it be which you have carefully written 
out on paper and put away in the drawer 
until the time comes to take it therefrom 
and use it, but some truth of God must it 
be which the Spirit of God has written out 
in you, which He has put into your mind, 
your soul, your very blood, so that when 
your heart beats it will seem to beat with 
it and send it pulsing through you. Re- 
member always, I say, that you are not 
simply to prepare a sermon for Sunday, but 
prepare to preach on Sunday. As inciden- 
tal to this you may use paper, twenty sheets 
or forty ; but be careful to bear in mind that 
the paper is for the sermon, and not the 
sermon for the paper, that the sermon is 
lord of the paper, and should not be en- 



188 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

slaved by it. Then, when Sunday comes 
you will be ready, not merely to deliver a 
sermon, but, what is more, to preach ; and 
your preaching will be better than any 
mere delivery of a sermon, however fine 
and admirable the delivery may be. And 
you will not need any books on oratory or 
elocution to teach you how to preach. To 
a certain extent such books may be of 
assistance to you, but it is only a very lim- 
ited extent. Sometimes they are helps, 
but sometimes, too, they are hindrances; 
and your instructors in elocution will, I 
am sure, tell you that the best kind of elocu- 
tion is the elocution of the man who, with 
some gift for preaching, stirs up the gift 
that is in him, and without much thought 
of elocution simply prepares to preach. 

And here let me say that I think it very 
questionable whether a person should pre- 
pare to preach more than once on Sunday. 
Many preachers do it, I know ; but there 
are not many who do it well. It is ex- 
ceedingly difficult to do it well. It is not 
difficult to sermonize twice on Sunday ; but 
it is difficult to preach twice on Sunday, 
or to prepare to preach twice. One living 
thought, or one living theme, living with 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 189 

the preacher, living in the preacher 
throughout the week that intervenes be- 
tween one Sunday and another, and pre- 
paring him to preach, is usually enough 
for the preacher, and is usually enough for 
the congregation. It was, I believe, Mr. 
Beecher who said that two sermons on 
Sunday were like two wads in a popgun, 
— one shoots the other out; and that is 
apt to be true with reference, not only to 
the congregation, but with reference to the 
preacher as well. The two sermons are 
apt to interfere with one another, and hurt 
and cripple one another ; and in the preach- 
er's mind, as in the congregation's mind, 
the tendency of one is to shoot the other 
out. I am aware that Mr. Beecher did not 
observe his own rule ; but Mr. Beecher 
was an exceptional man, and yet not ex- 
ceptional enough to be altogether inde- 
pendent of established usage and custom, 
but was, like the rest of us in this respect, 
victimized by convention ; and it would 
be, I think, a desirable thing if the conven- 
tion could be changed. Instead of having 
two preaching services on Sunday, it would 
in my judgment be better to make the sec- 
ond service a different kind of service, — 



190 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

a Praise Service, if you please, or a Prayer 
Service, or a Vesper Service of some sort, 
or a service simply of worship, with a few 
remarks by the minister, not more than ten or 
fifteen minutes in length, and suggested per- 
haps by some fragment of thought left over 
from the morning discourse. Or, if there 
are to be two preaching services on Sunday, 
then let the parish provide two preachers, 
not to preach to the same congregation, but 
to different congregations. Why indeed 
in some parishes, especially in the large 
cities, would it not be a good rule to have 
not only two preaching services on Sumky, 
but four or five such services by four or five 
different preachers ? Why should not our 
church buildings be utilized more than 
they are? Looking at it simply from a 
commercial point of view, is it not a poor 
and inadequate return for the investment, 
to have them open only for two or three 
hours on Sunday, or for about one hundred 
and fifty hours out of the whole year ? If 
I could do in this matter just what I should 
like to do, I would never close the churches 
except at night, when everything else is 
closed. I would keep them open always ; 
not only on Sunday, but on every other 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 191 

day ; and I would have some kind of serv- 
ice in them every day in the week ; not 
always, perhaps, a preaching service, but a 
service of some kind. In the case of many 
of our city churches that is what is done. 
That is what is done in St. Bartholomew's 
Church. It is open every day in the year, 
with the exception of a little while in mid- 
summer, when it is open only on Sundays. 
With that exception, it is open every day 
in the year, and every day in the year there 
is a service in it. This involves the having 
of more than one minister in the parish, 
for one minister, of course, cannot do all 
that in such a case is required. And here 
let me say that if there are to be several 
ministers in the parish, one of them in my 
judgment must be the head, — call him 
Rector, call him Pastor, call hini what 
you please ; he must be in fact the head. 
I know that some of my Congregational 
brethren differ from me in this, and that 
they are trying the experiment of having 
associate pastorates ; but I venture to ex- 
press the opinion that it will not work 
well, or that when it does work well it will 
be the exception and not the rule. In the 
majority of cases, however, I presume it 



192 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

would be found impracticable to have more 
than one clergyman in a parish ; and when 
that is the case, the congregation should 
be contented with one preaching service 
on Sunday. It will be better, as a rule, 
for the parish, and better, as a rule, for the 
preacher, and better for the parish because 
better for the preacher. One message a 
week is enough for him to prepare, and 
enough for them to hear ; and if they in- 
sist on more, the quality will be sacrificed 
to the quantity, and they will both suffer 
loss. 

I remark again that if the preacher pre- 
pares himself to preach in the way that I 
have suggested, he will have to prepare 
himself with a new preparation for every 
new occasion upon which he preaches. He 
will not have much use for old sermons, 
unless he can get back into the old moods 
of thought and the old moods of life, of 
moral and spiritual as well as mental life, 
— those old appealing moods which were 
with him indeed and possessed him when 
he prepared the old sermons, or when he 
prepared himself to preach them. Some- 
times he can do that, but not often ; and 
usually he will find when he preaches an 



PREPARING BIS MESSAGE 193 

old sermon that it is an old sermon ; and 
that although when first he preached it it 
was fairly good and effective, something 
seems to have gone out of it which then he 
felt was in it. And something has gone 
out of it, — the life has gone out of it, or 
part, at least, of the life. The thoughts are 
the same, the arguments are the same, the 
illustrations are the same ; he makes the 
same points, and perhaps with the very 
same words ; but they are the same with a 
difference, and that difference is vital. He 
preached before ; now he is delivering a 
sermon as a substitute for preaching. That 
is not always the case, but it is often the 
case ; and while there are some sermons 
which he can preach over and over again, 
and preach perhaps better, every time he 
preaches them because they are the product 
of permanent moods of thought, of mind, 
of heart, of soul ; there are not many such 
sermons, and he will not produce many 
such. Instead, therefore, of turning over 
the barrel and searching from time to time 
among its musty contents with a view 
to finding in it some suitable sermon to 
preach, it would be better to let it alone. 
Or, if he is disposed to turn it over very 
13 



194 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

much or often, it would be better still to 
destroy the barrel, and not have any, so 
that every week, with little or nothing in 
the way of old preparation to fall back 
upon, he might find himself committed to 
the task which is always new, and always 
interesting and stimulating because new, 
not of preparing to sermonize for half an 
hour on Sunday, but of preparing himself, 
mind and heart and soul and body, of pre- 
paring himself to preach. He may not 
always preach as he would like to preach, 
or as he feels he ought to preach ; but he 
will always feel that he is preaching, and 
his congregation will feel it, and will like 
to hear him preach; and a congregation, 
too, place him where you please, he will 
always have. 

One thing more, it seems to me, the 
preacher should have in mind in prepar- 
ing himself to preach. It does not bear 
directly, perhaps, upon his preparation, 
and yet perhaps it does. At all events, he 
should not forget it, but should have in 
mind the fact that he is preparing him- 
self to preach to an assembly of men and 
women who are gathered for something 
else, or who ought, at least, to be gathered 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 195 

for something else than simply to hear 
him preach. They are gathered for prayer, 
for praise, and to engage for a time in 
worship, and in the various acts and phases 
of worship. For that he must also pre- 
pare. That also is his task, not only to 
preach, but to worship, and to help the 
people to worship ; and to be to them, not 
merely the prophet of God, but the priest, 
— not in the Romish use of the term, 
as the human hierophant through whom 
God's blessings come, — but in the Protest- 
ant use of the term, as the human soul 
through whom God's blessings come. On 
whose soul as it rises to God the souls of 
the people rise, and by whose soul as it 
catches the inspirations of God the souls 
of the people are inspired, and enabled in 
spirit and truth to engage in the worship 
of God. Whether he can do that with 
a liturgy or Avithout one, I will not say. 
I have an opinion on that subject, but this 
is not the time nor the place to express 
it. I am not here to defend or advocate 
the use of the Prayer Book. But whether 
you use in your parishes a liturgical 
form of worship or a non-liturgical form, 
I may at least urge you not to slight 



196 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

worship, but to emphasize and make much 
of it, and to try to induce your people to 
make much of it. They will make much 
of it if you yourselves make much of it ; 
and it seems to me that you ought to 
make much of it. Something people must 
worship; something they do worship, — 
wealth, or power, or nature, or humanity, 
or God, or something. The only question 
is, what ? And the office of the Christian 
minister, in part at least, is to take that 
innate, ineradicable impulse of the human 
heart, and to give it expression towards 
God as Jesus Christ has revealed Him. It 
is to quicken in the mind that slumbering, 
spiritual faculty by which alone man can 
apprehend the reality of the spiritual life 
and of things unseen and eternal. 

Our human nature is as a rule very 
much under the dominion of the sensible 
and the near. Things at a distance, or 
which do not in any way appeal to the 
physical senses, are hard to realize. That 
is the standing difficulty which religion, 
dealing as it does so largely with super- 
sensible matters, must always encounter, 
and which it essays to meet and overcome 
by means of Christian worship, giving 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 197 

thereby to the soul that consciousness, 
that sureness, that certainty of itself which 
can only come by communion with the 
pervading and eternal soul of the world, 
that Father in whom all things live and 
by whom they are sustained. Never was 
it more needed than in this materialistic 
and not very reverent age, — an age which 
as George Eliot says, is so often flippant 
and coarse, mistaking a cynical mockery 
for the gift of penetration. This, she says, 
is the impoverishment which threatens us 
and our posterit}^, — the new famine, the 
meagre fiend, with lewd grin and clumsy 
hoof, breathing a mildew over the harvest 
of our moral sentiments. The office of 
the Christian ministry is to try to recover 
men from this flippant and irreverent 
materialism, not by preaching merely, but 
by lifting them up into the consciousness 
of that higher, nobler, albeit immaterial 
and invisible life which comes from com- 
munion with, and is found in the worship 
of, God. 

Make much of worship, then; and in 
making much of worship you will not be 
making little, but much of preaching too. 
You will be preparing yourselves to preach 



198 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

on those great and important themes with 
which the pulpit deals, and which will 
never grow old, and to answer for your 
people and with your people, and in the 
midst of your people, those great and 
important questions whose importunity 
will never abate. For, as an English 
reviewer and Congregational divine has 
said: "It is in the great congregation 
where heart beats with heart, and breaths 
conspire, and common beliefs and experi- 
ences draw the children of toil and pain 
into close, dear fellowships of sympathy 
and hope, that those answers will best be 
given. . . . 

" There is a power in public worship, 
in the utterance of common sorrows, needs, 
and hopes, in the prayer that is breathed 
and the praise that is sung in concert, not 
merely with the crowd that fills some 
particular sanctuary, but with the innu- 
merable company of all lands and ages who 
have drunk of the same spring and gone 
strengthened on their way, which they 
strangely miss who teach that worship is 
a worn-out superstition, and that only in 
the clear light of law can men walk and 
be blest. Ah, no, while man sins and 



PREPARING HIS MESSAGE 199 

suffers, while there is blood-tinged sweat 
upon his brow, while there is misery in his 
home and anguish in his heart, that voice 
can never lose its music, which speaks, not 
through preaching merely, but through 
worship as well, of the comfort and inspi- 
ration of the everlasting Gospel of Christ, 
which seems to tell the sin-tormented 
spirit the tale of the Infinite Pity, and to 
bid it lay its sobbing wretchedness to rest 
on the bosom of the Infinite Love." 

In the best way, then, you can, in the 
way that is best for you, try, not to prepare 
a sermon simply, but to prepare yourselves 
to preach, and to prepare yourselves to 
worship ; to preach to the people, to wor- 
ship iirith the people, and thus not by 
preaching merely, and not by worship 
merely, but by preaching and worship to 
lift up Him who has "lifted with His 
pierced hands empires off their hinges, 
turned the stream of centuries out of its 
channel, and still governs the ages ; " and 
who, when lifted up, will draw all men 
to Himself. 



THE 
PREACHER AND THE PARISH 



THE 
PREACHER AND THE PARISH 

CO far in these lectures I have been 
considering the preacher simply as a 
preacher, for that is what it seems to me 
he is chiefly called to be ; and with those 
who would belittle or depreciate that 
ministerial function I have no sympathy. 
While that, however, is his most important 
work, it is not his only work. He is a 
preacher, but he is more ; he is a worker 
in the pulpit, and he is a worker out of 
the pulpit. He is a worker in the parish : 
not in his personal capacity merely as a 
member of the parish, but in Iris capacity 
as the head of the parish ; and the parish 
which has made him its head and over 
which he presides is the instrument with 
which he works. And a very effective 
instrument for Christian work it is. There 
are not many workers so well equipped 
as he, for there are not many who have 
a constituency so compact, so tractable, so 



204 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

sympathetic as the Christian minister has. 
If he fails to use that effective parochial 
instrument, like the servant in the parable 
of the talent and the napkin, he is failing 
with a culpable ignorance, perhaps with a 
culpable sloth, to do in the world the work 
which he might do, which he ought to do, 
and for the doing of which in the provi- 
dence of God he has been so especially 
equipped. 

. It is one thing, however, to have an 
instrument given with which to do a work ; 
it is another thing to use it, or to know 
how to use it well and to the best advan- 
tage, and so that the best results may be 
accomplished by it. 

These are the questions to which I will 
venture now for a while to direct your 
thought and attention ; or, putting the 
matter more plainly, I will ask you in this 
lecture to consider with me the question, 
" How shall the Christian minister pro- 
ceed to make the parish over which he 
presides, to the utmost possible limit and 
in the most useful way, an active and work- 
ing parish ? " That, of course, will depend 
very largely upon the character of the 
parish, what it is, where it is, and how 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 205 

strong or weak it is. A parish in the city 
cannot be worked in the same way pre- 
cisely that a parish in the country can ; or 
a parish in one part of the city or country 
like a parish in another part of the city or 
country ; or a weak parish like a strong 
parish; or a rich parish like a poor one. 
Parish work in this respect resembles pulpit 
work, and depends upon the circumstances, 
which are not the same in all cases, which 
to some extent indeed are different in all 
cases ; and some of the methods and rules 
which are found to be good for one will be 
found to be bad for another, or at least not 
good for another and not adapted to it. 
There are rules, however, which are good 
for all, and applicable to all, and the first 
of these I have already intimated in say- 
ing that every parish should regard itself 
as unique, in its duties, its difficulties, its 
responsibilities, and should not try to copy 
any other parish, as every preacher is 
unique and should not try to copy any 
other preacher. He will make a mistake 
if he does, and so will the parish. In St. 
Bartholomew's Parish, for instance, we 
have a Loan Bureau, where we lend money 
in small amounts of from ten to two hun- 



206 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

dred dollars, aggregating about fifteen 
hundred dollars a week, charging a fair 
rate of interest, and taking as security a 
mortgage upon the furniture and house- 
hold goods of the borrower. I believe in 
that form of benevolence, and think it does 
great good. It is particularly needed in a 
city like New York. And St. Bartholo- 
mew's Parish was able in part to supply 
that need, and did and does supply it. 
But it is not particularly needed in a vil- 
lage like New Canaan, in this State, where 
I am in the habit of spending my summers. 
There are other needs there, more perti- 
nent and imperative ; and for any parish 
there to undertake to start a Loan Bureau, 
even if it could, would be a misdirection 
of energy. The thing itself is good and 
wise, but it is not good and wise in all cir- 
cumstances ; and whether or not it should 
be attempted will depend upon the circum- 
stances, the circumstances of the parish, 
and the circumstances of the community 
in which the parish is located. 

Or, take another illustration of a more 
general character. There is no problem 
perhaps in this country more pressing and 
wide-spread, and at the same time more 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 207 

difficult, than the drink problem, than the 
problem which deals with the traffic and 
use of intoxicating liquors ; and there is in 
my judgment no greater mistake than to 
try to solve that problem in the same way 
in all places. I am satisfied that it cannot 
be solved in a community of ten hundred 
thousand inhabitants in the same way that 
it can be solved in a community of ten 
hundred inhabitants. The best method in 
one case is not only not the best, but often 
the worst in another. And the reason why 
in America we have made so little progress 
towards the solution of it is, I think, be- 
cause we have failed to recognize that fact, 
and have tried each of us to universalize 
his own method, and to make it the method 
always, for everywhere, and for all. 

But I have no desire at present to dis- 
cuss the Temperance question, or to stir 
up strife and prejudice on that vexed and 
vexing subject. I have referred to it sim- 
ply because it furnishes in my judgment 
an apt illustration of what I am trying 
now to show, that even when a social prob- 
lem is everywhere the same, the method of 
its solution is not everywhere the same ; 
and that what is wisest and best for one 



208 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

place or one parish, may not be wisest and 
best and expedient for another. 

This, then, is the first rule which I would 
venture to give you for the development of 
a parish ; and wresting from its connection, 
and reversing the apostolic injunction, I 
would say, Let every minister of a parish 
look not upon the things of others, but 
upon his own things. Let him look with 
a hard, practical, open-eyed common sense 
upon his own parish, upon his own com- 
munity, its circumstances, its conditions, 
its needs. Let him not think because 
some particular clergyman in some particu- 
lar community has made himself conspicu- 
ous, and deservedly so, in some particular 
kind of work, in the work, let us say, of 
municipal reform, that he, the clergyman 
in some other community, is called upon 
to undertake the same kind of work. Let 
him be not an echo, but a voice ; for while 
the echo may be just as loud as the voice, 
and sometimes louder and shriller, it is 
nevertheless an echo. It is chiefly an 
amusing thing, and will certainly not ac- 
complish what the voice accomplishes, for 
the voice has personality in it, and the 
echo has not. Let not the clergyman 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 209 

think, again, because there is in some 
other parish a nourishing Blue Ribbon 
Society, or a Girls' Friendly Society, or a 
Christian Endeavor Society, or a St. An- 
drew's Brotherhood, or a Brotherhood of 
St. Andrew and St. Philip, that that is 
just the thing which he must start and 
have in his parish. Perhaps it is ; but 
perhaps it is not. He must determine 
that for himself ; and there is no Board of 
Control, at Boston, or Chicago, or New 
York which can determine it for hiin. He 
knows his own parish, or ought to know it, 
better than any one else ; and if it is desir- 
able (and it is) that he should co-operate 
with others in doing some large and gene- 
ral work in the church, or the nation, or 
the world, it is also desirable that he should 
co-operate with them in his own way, and 
that those who have the management of 
that large and general work should make 
its rules so few and flexible that he can 
co-operate with them in his own way and 
according to the differential exigencies of 
his own parochial situation. He must not 
be trammelled in his co-operation by alien 
and inapplicable rules. He must be free 
to adopt new methods which have not been 
14 



210 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

elsewhere adopted. He must be free also 
to attempt new works and enterprises which 
have not been elsewhere attempted. There 
are in business general rules which business 
men adopt, and which they observe and 
practise, and that is right, is necessary ; 
but they are not enslaved by those rules. 
And the successful man in business is the 
man who sees in the business world some 
new thing to do which has not been seen 
by others, or which at least has not been 
done by others ; who sees it, and seizes it, 
and makes it yield its rich and fruitful 
bounty to him. 

As it is in the business world, so should 
it be in the parish. Let every parish learn 
as much as it can from others, and let it as 
far as it can co-operate with others in the 
work of the Church at large. And yet let it 
not forget, and let not the*man who guides 
and directs its activities forget, that while 
general rules are good, so are particular 
rules, and that the valuable quality in 
the parochial as in the business world is 
not the quality which is always following 
precedents, or waiting for precedents to 
follow, but the quality which sometimes 
makes them, and then follows its own 
precedents. 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 211 

Let every minister then study his own 
parish, its needs, possibilities, and oppor- 
tunities, and the needs and opportunities 
of the community in which it is placed; 
prepared to unite with others and to do 
what others do, and also prepared to do at 
times something new and peculiar which 
others cannot do ; and thus he will contrib- 
ute some new and peculiar force towards 
the regeneration of human society at large, 
towards the establishment on the earth of 
the kingdom of the Son of Man. 

This, then, is the first rule to be observed 
in the development of parochial activity. 
It should be a form of activity germane to 
the parish, which the parish ought to do, 
and is able to do. 

Now, let us go on a little further, and 
see what the next rule is. Here, we will 
say, is a work to be done which the parish 
is capable of doing ; and how shall the man 
in charge of the parish proceed to have it 
done? The place, let us suppose, is a 
manufacturing or mill town, with a good 
many operatives in it ; and the minister in 
that town feels that he and his parish ought 
to do something for those operatives, for 
the men who work in those mills. He 



212 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

thinks it would be a good thing to estab- 
lish among them a society, a guild, a 
brotherhood, a club, for mental and moral 
advancement, or for wholesome recreation 
and pleasure ; a literary society, a debating 
society, an athletic society, or some kind 
of society which would be elevating and 
improving, and which would tend to give 
its members a more abundant life. Assum- 
ing, I say, that that is an expedient thing 
to do, what is the first step to take in the 
doing of it ? To call a public meeting of 
the people of the parish, or of the people 
who work in the mills, or a meeting includ- 
ing both, to talk about and discuss it, and 
listen to objections, and offer resolutions, 
and appoint committees, and draw up a 
constitution, with articles and rules and 
by-laws ? No ; a good many societies have 
been started in that way, and when they 
got started they stopped. After the con- 
stitution and the by-laws had been fully 
and carefully framed there seemed to be 
nothing else to do, or at least nothing was 
done. The societies in question were born, 
they had strength enough to be born, but 
not strength enough to go on living after 
they were born ; and having a constitution, 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 213 

but not the right kind of a constitution, 
they presently collapsed and died. What, 
then, is the right kind of constitution to 
start with ? Not a constitution on paper, 
however elaborate and admirable, but a 
constitution in flesh and blood. Let the 
minister who wants to start such a society 
as I have indicated start with that; not 
with by-laws, but with a man, or a woman. 
Let him try to find some one, whether man 
or woman, and whether in or out of the 
parish, who feels about the matter as he 
does, who will make it his personal work, 
or her personal work, and will devote him- 
self or herself to the faithful furtherance 
of it. Let him try to find some one who 
has not only the time for it, but the gift for 
it, the capacity for it, the patience, the 
courage, the enthusiasm. Let him begin, 
not with the establishment of a society, 
but with the establishment of a person- 
ality, making that the nidus, the liv- 
ing and attracting nidus to which the 
society will come, and around which it 
will gradually gather, and strengthen, and 
grow. Then after a while he can make 
his rules and by-laws for the government of 
the society when he has a society to govern, 



214 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

and will know, not from a doctrinaire and 
theoretical conjecturing, but from a practi- 
cal experimenting, what laws and rules he 
ought to make, and what he ought not to 
make. But let him try to find, first of all, 
the right kind of person in starting his 
society. Let him not start it until he does, 
for that, I am satisfied, is the way to start; 
and, started in that way, the society which 
he starts will become a successful society. 
There will be in it a personal force, and 
the magnetism of a personal force will 
draw to it in time other personal forces ; 
and the people of the parish, seeing it going 
on, will be more likely to support it, and to 
rally around and help it, not only with 
their approval, but also with their money, 
as far as they are able to give it. By and 
by they will boast of it, and be proud of it, 
and will appropriate it as their own, and 
speak of it as the society which they started, 
and as the good work which they inaugu- 
rated, and which their parish is doing. And 
the minister will be pleased to hear them 
talk so, and will encourage them so to talk, 
and yet will know in his heart that it was 
the one resolute man, or the one energetic 
woman, standing as the significant figure 



TEE PREACEEB AND TEE P ARISE 215 

at the beginning of it, who more than any 
one else, or than all others together, has 
contributed to its success. 

Now that, it seems to me, is a very 
important rule, and perhaps the most im- 
portant in the development of parochial 
activity. And not only is it important in 
the development of parochial activity, but 
in the development of all activity of a use- 
ful and wholesome kind. And if we take 
any one of the great movements of the 
world, social, political, or religious, — or 
any one of its great institutions, its schools, 
its academies, its hospitals, its benevolent 
societies, its missionary societies, its tem- 
ples of art and learning, — and try to trace 
it back through its history to its start, we 
shall usually find that it started, not with 
many, but with one ; that it started as the 
Bible starts, with a personality, "In the 
beginning, God ; " or that, as in the case of 
the Christian Church, a personality is its 
corner-stone. Nearly all the great and 
fruitful activities of the world have been 
started in that way; and from them we 
may learn the rule to be observed by us in 
our parochial world. Business men have 
learned it, and the first concern of the busi- 



216 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

ness man in trying to develop his business, 
or in trying to start and establish some new 
department in it, is to find some suitable 
person to whom he can give it in charge, 
and whom, placed at the head of it, he can 
make responsible for it. So much depends, 
he knows, upon finding the man to begin 
with, and the right and fit man, that he 
will not begin until he does find him. And 
then when he does find him (except for 
general guidance and direction), he does 
not interfere with him, but leaves it largely 
to him, if not to plan, at least to execute, 
the details of the enterprise which has been 
committed to him. 

This leads me to speak of another rule 
which it would be well for the clergyman 
to adopt in the development of parochial 
activity, and which, if not like unto the 
one which I have just mentioned, is at 
least suggested by it. And that other rule 
is this : not to do himself what somebody 
else can do as well. 

It has doubtless occurred to you, while 
I have been speaking and telling you that 
the way in which to promote and develop 
some new parochial adventure is to find 
the right person to start with, that that 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 217 

is not always an easy thing to do. It 
may be comparatively easy in a very large 
parish, which has the constituency of a 
very large membership to draw from ; but 
most parishes are not large, or not very 
large ; and in the ordinary parish, however 
desirable it may be, or however necessary, 
it is not always easy to find some suitable 
person, some suitable man or woman with 
whom to begin to do some needed paro- 
chial work. And surely it is not easy. If 
it were, then everything would be easy, 
and the problem of parochial activity would 
not be much of a problem. And yet, de- 
spite the greatness of the difficulty, it is not, 
I am convinced, even in the ordinary par- 
ish, insuperable. And if the parish clergy- 
man, instead of devoting so much of his 
time to the doing of things himself, would 
devote it rather to the finding of some one 
else to do them, he would be, I think, very 
often — of tener than he supposes before he 
tries — successful in his search. That, it 
seems to me, is what he should have in 
mind in visiting in his parish, and in try- 
ing more and more to become acquainted 
with it, namely, to discover individuals in 
it who are fitted for particular things, for 



218 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

particular kinds of work, saying to one 
and another, as from time to time he finds 
them, here is something for you to do, and 
here is something for you, and you. That 
is his parish problem, not how he can do 
all things himself : he cannot do them all 
himself; he has not the time nor the 
strength ; nor ought he indeed to do them 
even if he could. His work is to set others 
to work, and to be active in making them 
active. And if he tries to do every tiling 
himself, he will not only fail in the attempt, 
but will also fail in developing the activity 
of his parish. And that is what chiefly he 
is trying to do : not simply to work him- 
self, but to make his parish work ; and 
however busy and industrious he may be 
personally, unless he can thereby make his 
parish industrious and busy, he will not, 
and cannot, become a successful parish 
worker. There are some clergymen, it has 
been said, who are forever confounding in- 
spiration with perspiration. It is a homely 
phrase, but an apt one ; and the confusion 
to which it refers does, I fear, exist in the 
minds of not a few. They are active in 
moving about, and in making parish calls, 
and in doing this and that, and going here 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 219 

and there, and hastening on to attend to 
something else, with but little time to 
give us when we happen to come across 
them. They always seem so busy, so 
breathlessly busy, and they alwa} r s are so 
busy ; and as in our quieter and humbler 
spheres we stand apart and look at them, 
the words of the apostle will somehow 
force themselves upon us and come into our 
minds, that " bodily exercise profiteth lit- 
tle." They are not, at least, the models, so 
we venture to think, of the ideal parish 
clergyman who, in a quieter way, with less 
fussiness and more thoughtfulness, is for- 
ever working upon, and working out the 
problem how he can best succeed in mak- 
ing his people work. He is not idle, far 
from it ; he has much to do, very much ; 
his work is hard and exacting, and taxes 
all his strength. But it is the work of one 
who leads, or the work of one who inspires, 
who is always trying to find the right 
things to be done, and the right persons to 
do them; and who, when he has found 
them, trusts them, and does not needlessly 
interfere with them, knowing that people 
will work best when they are allowed to 
work in their own way, and to put their 



220 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

own personality into their work. It will 
be his duty, of course, to suggest and plan 
the work, the character of it, the scope of 
it, and the policy for the workers to pursue. 
He will also have to encourage and help 
them in their work, and to keep himself in 
touch with it ; and yet he will let them 
feel that it is their work, and that what 
they can do as well as he, he will not do, 
but will reserve himself for the doing of 
what they cannot do. 

I have referred to the methods adopted 
by men in the business world, and that is 
one of their methods : not to do themselves 
what others can do as well, or well enough, 
and only to do themselves what others can- 
not do. That is the way in which they 
are able, often to our amazement, to accom- 
plish so much. They have learned the 
secret of transferring whatever is transfer- 
able to agents, to clerks, to book-keepers, 
to stenographers, to various kinds of depu- 
ties ; and while they guide and direct those 
deputies and clerks, they let them do the 
work, and trust them to do the work, and 
expect them to do the work which has been 
given to them to do. It is a good rule in 
the business world, experience has proved it 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 221 

good ; and it is equally good in the paro- 
chial. I know, indeed, that the two cases 
are not exactly parallel, and that we cannot 
proceed in precisely the same manner in 
both. The vicarious work in the business 
world is paid work, and if it is not done, 
or not done well, the persons intrusted with 
it can be and are dismissed ; while in the 
parochial world the work that is done by 
others is largely gratuitous and voluntary, 
and the workers themselves in consequence 
cannot be so closely and strictly held to 
the mark. As far, however, as it is feas- 
ible, it is a good rule to adopt ; and the best 
results, I am confident, cannot be developed 
or obtained in the parochial world until 
something like it has been adopted there. 
A little work can be done, but not a large 
work. It will be a work done by the min- 
ister, and not a work done by the parish ; 
and it is a work done by the parish which 
the minister wishes done, and should exert 
himself to have done, but which, of course, 
by the parish will not be done, nor even 
attempted, as long as the minister tries to 
do it all himself. 

May I refer to my own experience here, 
and say that that is the method which I 



222 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

have found it necessary to adopt. We have 
in St. Bartholomew's Parish a good many 
departments of parochial activity. We have 
not only our Sunday-schools, and mission- 
ary societies, and benevolent societies, but 
a Swedish mission, and a Chinese mission, 
and an Armenian mission, and a Syrian 
mission, and a lodging-house, and a loan 
bureau, and an employment bureau, and a 
coffee-house, and a penny provident fund, 
and a girls' club, and a boys' club, and a 
men's club, and a gymnasium, and a kin- 
dergarten, and a surgical clinic, and a med- 
ical clinic, and an eye and ear clinic, — but 
the list is long enough. Now, it would 
have been absolutely impossible for me 
or any other man to get all these things 
started, unless I had adopted the rule, not 
simply of trying to do things myself, but 
of trying to find others to do them. I am 
in touch with all those things, and try as 
best I can to guide and direct them. And 
once every week I have a conference with 
the heads of all the departments of parish 
work, and the head of each department 
makes to me at that conference a weekly 
report of his work, and Ave talk over the 
matter together, and wind things up, as it 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 223 

were, for another week ; and so the work 
goes on, and there is but little friction in 
it. The head of a parish, therefore, like 
the head of a business, if he would have 
the parish do its largest possible work, must 
learn to transfer whatever in his work can 
be transferred to others, and must not do 
himself what they can do as well, but must 
only do himself what they cannot do. 
Even then he will find, as the work of his 
parish grows, that his hands are more than 
full, and that the work which he is called 
upon to do is more indeed than he can do. 

This leads me to speak of still another 
rule, which is like the rule of transference, 
namely, the rule of a wise and a judicious 
postponement. I do not know who said it 
first, but it has been often said since, that 
one should never put off until to-morrow 
what can be done to-day. That may be a 
good rule for an idle man, or for a man 
who is disposed to be idle ; but it is not 
good, I am sure, for a man who is crowded 
with work. Such a man must learn, not 
only how to transfer whatever can be trans- 
ferred, but also how to postpone whatever 
can be postponed. For even when he has 
transferred whatever can be transferred, 



224 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

there is often still a residuum left which is 
more than he can do at that particular 
time, and he must make another transfer- 
ence, not to another person, but to another 
time. And from the various things which 
have been devolved upon him, — the letters 
he has to write, the calls he has to make, 
the directions he has to give, the plans he 
has to form, and the activities to superin- 
tend, or the wheels to set in motion and 
to keep in motion, all of which that day 
he cannot personally do, — he must select 
those things which are that day most urgent, 
and which cannot well be left to another 
and later day ; and whatever can be left to 
another and later day must be so left. He 
must learn the art of a wise and judicious 
postponement, not because he is lazy, but 
because he is very busy. It is an art, and 
the busy man has learned it. He has had to 
learn it ; and instead of not putting off until 
to-morrow what can be done to-day, he has 
found from personal experience that it is 
sometimes wise to reverse that proverbial 
precept, and not to do to-day what can be 
put off until to-morrow. He has found, 
too, from experience that it is an economi- 
cal rule, and that a certain percentage of 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 225 

the work he is called to clo, if postponed, 
will not have to be done, or will somehow 
do itself. And he reckons on that per- 
centage, and counts it in his work, or rather 
counts it out, — he discounts it, and learns 
to do each day only what each day he can 
do and ought to do, or ought most to do, 
and to leave the rest undone, and not to 
worry about it. And not worrying about 
to-morrow, he will be better prepared for 
to-morrow and for whatever to-morrow 
brings, and will sometimes find, when it 
comes, that it does not come at all as he 
supposed it would come, or does not bring 
at all what he supposed it would bring. 
Now that is a rule for the man who is 
very much pressed with work, for the very 
busy man. It is not a rule for the man 
who is not much pressed with work, who 
is not a busy man. And in saying that it 
is a rule for the clergyman to adopt in the 
development of parochial activity, I take 
it for granted, of course, that the clergyman 
is a very busy man, a man pressed with 
work, and pressed for time in which to do 
his work. If he is that kind of man he 
will learn the art of postponement : expe- 
rience will teach it to him. He will use it 
15 



226 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

without abusing it: not with a view to 
shirking his work, or to letting it go un- 
done, but simply with a view to the better 
performance of it ; and he will know what 
I mean. But if he is not that kind of 
man, he will not know what I mean, or 
will pervert and wrest my meaning, and 
think that the counsel which I give is 
neither wise nor safe. And for him it is 
not safe ; and this much of my meaning at 
least I should be glad to have him under- 
stand, that I do not mean him, and that in 
saying what I have said, I have had in mind 
the man who, to the utmost of his capacity, 
and without sparing himself, is trying to 
make the parish for which in the provi- 
dence of God he has been made responsi- 
ble an active and working parish. And 
because I believe, young gentlemen, that 
that is your ambition, I have ventured to 
give you some of the rules which I have 
learned from experience, and which in my 
case, at least, experience has proved to 
be helpful. 

What are those rules ? Let me sum- 
marize them. First, you should study 
your own parish, and try to develop in it 
only such activity as it is fitted to do. 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 227 

Second, you should do it by finding the 
right persons to do it. Third, you should 
transfer what you can transfer, and keep 
for yourselves only what is your personal 
work ; and fourth, you should learn in 
doing your work the art of a wise and 
judicious postponement, doing to-day what 
you can do, or what seems to-day most 
urgent, and then without fret or worry 
leaving the rest undone. 

Let me add two or three counsels more. 
In the development of parochial activity 
do not go too fast. Do one tiling well 
first, get it Avell started and established, 
and make a success of it before you start 
something else ; and that, when you have 
made a success of it, will suggest some- 
thing else to start, and not only so, but will 
enable you the better to start it. Your 
people will see that you are a practical 
man, and a wise one, and that what you 
undertake to do you carry through and 
do. They will be more likely to give you 
their confidence, to believe in you, and to 
help you. They will look upon you as a 
man who always succeeds in his work, and 
and they will contribute to your success, 
and success will lead to success, and to 



228 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

still greater success. And when, from 
time to time, you make some new pro- 
posals to them, they will feel that you 
at least know what you are about; and 
your opinion will be their opinion, and 
your judgment their judgment, for they 
will have had experience of your judgment, 
and will have found that it is good, and 
they will follow where you lead. 

In the development of parochial activity, 
therefore, do not go too fast. Make one 
thing a success before you start something 
else, and you will find in the end that that 
is the fastest way. 

This other advice I give. In the devel- 
opment of parochial activity you will need 
money, — not much, it may be, but some ; 
and the money which you need must 
come from your parishioners. They are 
the persons to whom you will have to 
look to obtain it ; and if you would be suc- 
cessful in your efforts to obtain it you 
must inspire them with confidence, not 
merely in your moral character, but in 
your business character. You must make 
a report of the money, whether much or 
little, which from time to time they give 
you, and which passes through your hands : 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 229 

not with a view to showing or proving 
that you are honest, — that of course they 
clo not question, — but simply because it 
is business, and you are dealing with busi- 
ness men who are accustomed to that sort 
of thing, and who in the business world 
require it. They may not require it of 
you as their clergyman, but they will be 
gratified if, without requiring it, they re- 
ceive it. And when as business men they 
see that you deal with money in a practical 
and business-like way, and are always able 
to account and always do account for every 
dollar, for every cent, that has been in- 
trusted to you, it will be not only a satis- 
faction to them, but a kind of satisfaction 
which will be productive of liberality in 
them, and dispose them to intrust you 
with more money. 

Be careful, then, about money matters. 
You cannot be too careful. And when 
you take a collection, take it in such a way 
that the people will understand, not that 
they are being asked to give to something 
they know not what exactly, and simply 
because it is a custom to take collections 
in churches, but to something they do know 
what, which you have made them know 



230 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

with clear and full knowledge. Then 
when you have taken it, be particular 
always to account for it, and to show that 
it has been used in the way you promised 
to use it : not for the sake, I say again, of 
making clear your integrity in the matter, 
— that is not doubted, — but simply because 
that is the business way to proceed ; and 
in dealing with business men in the busi- 
ness aspects of your parish work you want 
to be business-like. A little knowledge of 
book-keeping is desirable in a clergyman ; 
and whether he handles thousands of 
dollars, or hundreds of dollars, or less, it 
is equally desirable ; and the clergyman 
who keeps an account of the money which 
he handles, and in proper times and ways 
reports it to his people, will not, I think, 
as a rule, experience much difficulty in 
obtaining from his people such reasonable 
sums of money for the development of 
parochial activity as they are able to 
give. The American people are practical 
and business-like, but they are also gener- 
ous ; and when they believe in the cause, 
and when they believe in the man who 
embodies and pleads the cause, they will 
help him to his heart's desire. 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 231 

And now, having said all of this to yon 
about your parish work and the way in 
which I think it ought to be done, what I 
have said would be incomplete unless I 
should supplement it with something else. 
For I would not have you feel that in 
doing your parish work in the way that 
your parish requires, you are doing only 
your parish work. You are doing a work 
which reaches far beyond your parish. No 
man can live to himself to-day, and no 
parish can live to itself. Every man is 
related to every other man, and every 
parish is related to every other parish. 
And it is, after all, not our parishes merely 
that we are trying to develop and build, 
it is the kingdom of God we are trying to 
build. Human life on earth is not many, 
but one ; and to-day we are beginning to 
perceive and realize that fact as we have 
never perceived and realized it before. 
Barriers between the people still exist of 
course, and always will exist, for God has 
made men different, and we cannot make 
them alike. Barriers still exist, therefore, 
but they are not so high as they used to 
be, they are not so hard to get over. The 
" demos " is asserting itself. The people 
are coming up and getting nearer together ; 



232 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

and as they clasp each other's hands 
stretched across the boundaries, and heart 
beats against heart, and they look over the 
walls with a glad surprise into each other's 
faces, they are astonished to see and find 
how much alike they are, how much they 
have in common; and that the humanity 
which unites them is greater and more 
than the circumstance which divides them. 
That, I say, is what at present we are 
beginning to realize as we have never 
realized it before. We are beginning to 
realize as never before that the true field 
of human life and effort is not that little 
spot of earth on which our feet are stand- 
ing, — the village, the town, the city in 
which we are dwelling, or the parish to 
which we belong. We are moving to-day 
upon a larger plane. We are finding our 
correlations in a wider sphere. We are 
gathering our subsistence for heart, for 
soul, for mind as well as for body from a 
vaster expanse of territory. All the people 
to-day in all the world are thronging us. 
What we think is going far beyond us 
into the thought of the world. What 
we do is going far beyond us into the 
conduct of the world. The individual 
touches the multitude; the multitude 



THE PREACHER AND THE PARISH 233 

touches the individual; each overflowing 
into all, and all flowing back again into 
the bosom of each. Hence it is that people 
feel to-day there is nothing so out of place 
as narrow-mindedness ; nothing so galling, 
so fretting, so hard to bear as provincialism ; 
because they feel that provincialism is a 
wrong accent in this closing decade of the 
nineteenth century life; and that the 
little narrow-minded man who takes no 
interest in anything except what he is 
doing, is born out of due time, and should 
have been born ten hundred years ago, 
when the field of human sympathy and 
fellowship was more in correspondence 
with Iris little narrow thought. 

While, therefore, we must do our parish 
work according to its needs and opportuni- 
ties, and in the way that it ought to be 
done, we must not allow ourselves to be- 
come little narrow-minded clergymen, tak- 
ing upon us simply the hue and complexion 
of our parochial environment. We must 
try to realize rather that the field in which 
we are working is as broad as the world 
itself ; and that while in our seA^eral par- 
ishes we are doing our parish work, we 
are at the same time doing a work which 



234 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

is more than our parish work, and which 
is somehow contributing to the establish- 
ment on the earth of the Kingdom of God. 
It was, as you know, the custom of the 
Roman emperors to celebrate with their 
subjects the annual feast of the Terminalia, 
in which they worshipped the god Ter- 
minus, who presided over the boundary 
lines ; but the Kingdom of Jesus Christ 
has no boundary lines, or not now at least, 
and its Terminalia will not be celebrated 
until the whole wide world shall have been 
made subject to Him whose temple on the 
earth we are trying now to build. Not 
indeed in our time will that temple be 
built ; but it will be built some day, and 
we can help to build it. And if the angels 
in heaven can somehow see and rejoice 
over penitent sinners here, may not we 
perhaps, somewhere in the universe, we 
know not where, but somewhere, see the 
structure finished which we have helped 
to build ; and mingle our voices with the 
shoutings of those who cry, " Grace, grace 
unto it ! " when the headstone shall be 
brought forth at last, and the world in 
which we are living now shall have 
become the Temple of God ! 



THE PREACHER MAKING THE 
MOST OF HIMSELF 



THE PREACHER MAKING THE 
MOST OF HIMSELF 

TN approaching the end of this course 
of lectures, in which I have been try- 
ing to tell you something about "The 
Preacher and His Place," I am impressed 
very strongly with the feeling, not that I 
have said what I ought not to have said, 
but that I have left unsaid so much that I 
ought to have said. More and more it has 
been borne in upon me that it is impossible 
for one person to lay down rules or pre- 
scribe methods for another. No man can 
tell another the secret of himself, however 
poor that secret may be, for the reason that 
it is even to himself a secret. He may do 
things fairly well, but he cannot tell how 
he does them, or he can tell only in part, 
and the part which he does not and cannot 
tell is the most vital and important part. 
I remember once saying to a very gifted 
preacher just after I had heard him preach 
one of his inspiring and inspired sermons, 



238 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

that I was not surprised the people came 
in such great crowds to hear him, and that 
I could well understand why they came. 
" I can't," was his simple and modest 
answer ; and I do not believe he could ; 
neither could I, although I said I could. 
But what I meant was this, that there was 
a great and helpful attractiveness in his 
preaching which I perceived and felt, as 
did everybody else who heard him ; but 
what that attractiveness really was, or in 
wdiat it consisted, I could not say then, 
and cannot say now. Personality, perhaps, 
would express it as much as anything else. 
But then, again, what is personality ? Or 
why is it that that force which Ave call per- 
sonality is so much more forceful in some 
than it seems to be in others? I do not 
know. That is part of the mystery of life 
which cannot be explained. Mr. Ruskin 
says, somewhere, that the greatness or 
smallness of every person is determined 
for him at the outset, just as it is deter- 
mined for a fruit whether it shall be an 
apricot or a pear. And that I presume is 
true ; and as far as it is true the individual 
himself has nothing to do in the matter 
except to be what Gocl made him, or except 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 239 

to become what the God who made him 
meant that he should become. 

But how may he become what he was 
meant to become ? Here, perhaps, is where 
advice and counsel may legitimately come 
in, and where the suggestions of one may 
be helpful and useful to others. And in 
this closing lecture I will try to tell you 
how I think the preacher can make the 
most of himself, how he can develop such 
power of personal force, such power of per- 
sonality as may be potential in him, and 
which more than anything else will make 
his preaching a power. 

First, however, let me call your attention 
to the fact that it is not easy to-day to 
develop that personal force, and that the 
constitution of modern society is such that 
instead of tending to make personality rich 
and strong, it tends sometimes to make it 
poor and weak. Let me show you what 
I mean by the help of illustration. It is, 
I think, Mr. Herbert Spencer who some- 
where says that there is an antagonism 
oftentimes between what he calls the in- 
crease of size or bulk and the increase of 
organism or structure, the one growing not 
infrequently at the expense of the latter. 



240 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

In the vegetable kingdom, for instance, 
those plants which grow very rapidly in 
bulk do not possess, as a general thing, as 
much strength and toughness of structural 
fibre as those which grow more slowly. 
They are not so vigorous and hardy ; they 
have less power of resistance, and cannot 
encounter so successfully the adverse influ- 
ence of the elements, and are more likely 
to wither and die. So, too, in the animal 
kingdom. The boy who grows very rapidly 
in size is apt to become weakened for a 
time in vital force by the precocity of his 
physical development, and to be made more 
liable to disease. 

Now, what is true of existence in the 
animal and vegetable kingdom seems to be 
equally true of existence in the social king- 
dom. The size of life in our time, its 
physical proportions, so to speak, have been 
characterized by a precociously rapid and 
unprecedented development and growth. 
Our extent of vision to-day, our oppor- 
tunity of action, our curriculum of study, 
our range of influence, our sphere of sym- 
pathy, the entire circumference of our 
being, by reason of modern invention and 
skill, has been most wonderfully enlarged. 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 241 

The life of the whole round world to-day 
is humming and buzzing, shouting and 
singing, laughing and crying, whispering 
and thundering, and all at once, its story 
into our ears. Yes, and more than that. 
By spectroscope and telescope we of this 
generation have been carried beyond the 
society of this earthly planet, and intro- 
duced into the society of the universe 
itself. We have grown so in size that we 
can reach out and touch the stars ; so large 
and giant in form have we become that we 
can take them into our arms, resolve them 
into their constituent and component parts, 
and weigh them in our scales. And yet 
this rapid development of our life in social 
size and bulk may militate against the 
development of individual organism and 
structure, — the great power of society 
weakening personal force. The very mul- 
titude of our opportunities and privileges 
paralyzing our action. The very abun- 
dance of our pleasures diminishing our joy. 
The very greatness of our educational ad- 
vantages dissipating the mental force. 
There are so many books to read to-day 
that we read none of them well. There 
are so many tilings to think about to-day 

16 



242 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

that we are in clanger of losing the power 
of concentrated thought. It is so easy 
to-day to read the Bible in our mother 
tongue that it lies on the table neglected. 
It is so easy to-day, in comparison with 
what it used to be, to go to church, that 
we don't go. The house in which we live 
is luxurious in its appointments, and the 
life that we live there is so often sluggish 
and dull. The church in which we gather 
to worship God is rich in its splendor and 
beauty, and the worship that we offer there 
is so often barren and dead. The school- 
house splendid and the scholar dull; the 
church magnificent and the worshipper 
drowsy. Socially becoming stronger and 
greater, personally weaker and less. 

We are told to-day that the genius of 
the drama is declining ; that the power of 
the pulpit is waning ; that literature is 
losing its originality because of its volumi- 
nousness ; that statesmanship is degene- 
rating; and while the statement is not 
unqualifiedly true, it has enough truth in 
it to illustrate how the great development 
of life in social size may militate against 
the development of individual structure, 
weakening personal capacity and force. 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 243 

There are so many tilings going on in our 
modern world, so many oracles of wisdom 
clamoring to be heard, so many prophets 
prophesying, so many preachers preaching, 
so many critics criticising, so many voices 
of one kind and another sounding in our 
ears, that we feel like a person in an 
overcrowded drawing-room at an evening 
party, utterly dazed and bewildered, un- 
able to speak or listen to anybody coher- 
ently for any length of time on any subject, 
or to give forth any sound having sense 
and meaning ; stupified, asphyxiated, spell- 
bound by the great chattering, brilliant 
world society about us. 

Instead, therefore, of making much of 
individuals to-day, we put our trust in 
corporations, in institutions, in organiza- 
tions, in machines ; the individual man 
becoming less and less important, shrink- 
ing into smaller and smaller proportions, 
gradually going down into the depths of 
obscurity and darkness, dropping out of 
sight and mind. The corporation every- 
thing, the individual nothing ; socially 
great and strong, personally weak and 
unimportant. That, I say, is a tendency 
to which we are exposed. Society has 



244 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

become overgrown, and we cannot easily 
keep up with it. The world of human 
interests is getting to be too big for us, is 
developing too rapidly, and we are trying 
to absorb and assimilate so much in our 
attempt to keep up with the times, as we 
say, that the faculties are in danger of 
becoming congested. 

How may this danger be avoided ? How 
may a man to-day, in spite of all these 
antagonistic tendencies, make the most of 
himself, and develop to the utmost his 
potential personality? I answer, first, by 
a fixed and steadfast purpose to serve the 
human life about him. See how a fixed 
and steadfast purpose operates in one's 
life. Two persons, we will suppose, go 
on 'Change together at some great com- 
mercial or metropolitan centre, New York, 
or Chicago, or Paris, at some feverish 
crisis in the market. One of them goes 
there for no particular purpose ; he simply 
drops in as a stranger visiting the city to 
note what can be seen and heard. And 
the power of that strange, tumultuous life, 
that shouting, and screaming, and flinging 
of arms overhead, that hurried and feverish 
movement to and fro, as though all Bedlam 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 245 

had broken loose, it is too much for him. 
He is stupefied, dazed, lost. He seems to 
be in everybody's way. Everybody else 
seems to be in his way. He is tripping 
over everybody. Everybody seems to be 
tripping over him, and he is in danger of 
being crushed. But the other man goes 
there for a purpose. There is somebody 
he wants to see there, must see ; or there 
is business of a particular sort that he 
wants to transact there. He has stocks to 
sell, or grain, or cotton, or wool to buy. 
He goes there for a purpose, and the power 
of that purpose guards him, guides him, 
steadies him, saves him from being crushed 
and overcome. Well, it is the same way 
in the broader areas of life. Go out into 
the world, and live your lives without any 
fixed and definite object, and the bright 
glare of the world's great society will 
dazzle you; the roar of the world will 
deafen you, perhaps madden you. So 
many things there are you could easily do 
if you wanted to ; so many things inviting 
you to their performance ; so many things, 
I say, that you could easily do if you wanted 
to, that you do not do any of them ; thus 
floating, sinking, gone at last, having ac- 



246 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

complished little or nothing. But hold up 
the shield of a purpose, no matter what it 
is, and stick to it, and you are protected 
thereby from the confusing and bewilder- 
ing noises about you. The roar of the 
battle may be at the very gate ; but the 
voice of the inspiration of the purpose that 
is crying in you is louder than the sur- 
rounding strife, and your life goes straight 
on with your purpose. 

Then, further, let it be a purpose not to 
be ministered unto, but, as in the case of 
Jesus Christ, to minister to the human life 
about you. And how strangely and quickly 
will all the best forces of that human life 
about you give themselves to you, their 
beauty, their power, their life, and become 
incorporated in you, become as it were you. 
They will take their crowns and crown 
you. They will lift you up and exalt you, 
and give their blessing to you, and will 
help to make you all that you are cap- 
able of becoming. Is it not the same 
great principle which we see operating 
everywhere else? "Serve me long and 
well," says art; "be my minister first, and 
then some day you shall become my mas- 
ter." " Kneel low at my footstool with 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 217 

patient and reverent homage," says the 
kingdom of nature to the inquiring disci- 
ple, " and then some day you shall sit on 
my tin-one." So does the world of human 
life about you seem to say the same thing 
to you. " Take your life and live it for 
yourself alone, and I will do little or noth- 
ing for you. I will give you none of the 
enrichment wherewith I am enriched ; and 
my best and strongest influences, which 
would help you so much to come to your- 
self, you will never know or reach. But 
take your life and live it, not for yourself, 
but for me, and then I will give it back a 
hundredfold unto your bosom again, and 
you shall thus become and reach your best 
and truest self, your greatest and highest 
self." Is it not the way in which every- 
thing comes to itself, — not through itself, 
but through others? Take, for instance, 
anything you please, — a tree, a house, a 
church, this church, or this chapel, or some 
particular object or feature in this chapel, 
this window, for instance, behind me. Is it 
a thing by itself ? Apparently it is, but in 
reality it is not. How did it come to be 
where it is? Somebody put it there. Be- 
fore somebody put it there somebody else 



248 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

made it. And where did he find the mate- 
rial out of which to make it ? He found 
it in the earth. And how did it come to 
be in the earth ? B} T a long, long process, 
too long to tell about, it grew there. And 
what made it grow there ? Heat, and cold, 
and moisture, and summer, and winter, and 
fire, and vapor, and snow, and friction, and 
decomposition, and petrifaction. It came 
to be itself not by itself, but through other 
things outside of itself ; and except for 
those other innumerable things outside of 
itself it would never have reached itself. 
Its personality, so to speak, would never 
have been developed. 

And that is just as true of human nature 
as it is of inanimate nature. No man can 
reach the full stature of his personality ex- 
cept through others. Living alone and 
standing apart from others, he can never 
show what he is, " but only what he is not." 
He can only show, as some one has said, 
that he is not a friend, or acquaintance, or 
companion, or comrade, or neighbor; he 
exists for nobody; and presently, to his 
surprise, and generally to his horror, he 
will discover that he is nobody. The peo- 
ple about us to-day are not really other 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 249 

people, they are ourselves, in whom we be- 
come alive, and reach, and find ourselves, 
and in whose features, masked and dis- 
guised by suffering, and need, and igno- 
rance, and foolishness, and want, we shall 
find as the mask is lifted the features of 
ourselves. 

There is, therefore, no more effective way 
in which a man can develop and bring out 
to the utmost the potential force of per- 
sonality in him than by that manner of life 
which in the Christian ministry is yours, or 
which is in theory yours, and should be 
yours in fact. It is sometimes said, I 
know, that the Christian minister's life is 
a very narrow life ; and so sometimes it is. 
But if it is so, it is not because it ought to 
be so, but because he has made it so. Let 
him steadfastly maintain in his ministry 
the great unselfish purpose of his ministry to 
touch, and heal, and help, and in some \x&y 
to serve the human life about him, and more 
and more will that human life give itself 
to him, and make his power more, his per- 
sonality more. It is not, then, young gen- 
tlemen, a little and narrow calling into 
which you are going ; it is the biggest and 
the broadest of all callings ; and a calling, 



250 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

too, which as you pursue it will make you 
big and broad. With a heart and mind and 
soul open on all sides towards your fellow 
men, you will acquire that most effective 
of all forces, personal force, and which 
more than anything else will make your 
preaching effective. 

And yet, while all this is true, it is not 
the whole truth. There is something more 
to be said. There is another environment 
about you besides the human environment, 
and Godward as well as man ward you must 
open your hearts and souls. And if you 
are to become the highest and the best that 
you are capable of becoming, you must 
learn to live in communion with the highest 
and the best. I am a strong believer in 
prayer as a factor in personal development. 
And the men who have been the great 
leaders in the Christian Church in the past, 
and whose personality has contributed much 
to the making and moulding of the Church, 
have been men who prayed much as well 
as men who worked much; and who, 
through prayer, were made patient, and 
brave, and strong in work, and fitted for 
their work. And in the same way, young 
gentlemen, must we be fitted for our work, 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 251 

through the quickening power of prayer ; 
and whatever tends to weaken confidence 
in prayer tends to weaken us, and to pre- 
vent us from reaching and using that power 
of personal force by which alone we can do 
our best and greatest work. It cannot be 
denied, however, that there are tendencies 
to-day which seem to be energizing in that 
direction. We meet them not only in 
others through reading and conversation, 
we often feel them ourselves; and some- 
times, indeed, when with bowed head or 
bended knee we are engaged in the very 
act of prayer, the thought will somehow 
suddenly come and be suggested to us, 
What is the use of it after all ? Is there 
any good in prayer ? Is there any reality 
in it ? Are we indeed speaking into the 
ear of God, or simply articulating into the 
air? Does the Lord Almighty hear our 
prayer, and will He answer? Or are we 
simply repeating and mumbling pious 
words and phrases because we have been 
taught to do so, whose only response is 
their echo, and not even that ? 

It may not be amiss, therefore, if in the 
closing part of this closing lecture I ven- 
ture to say something to you about these 



252 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

tendencies which seem to militate against 
the reality of prayer. Most of them might 
be summarized in some such statement or 
objection as this : Nature being uniform in 
its working, effect following cause there 
with an unerring regularity of sequence 
and occurrence, prayer is an exercise con- 
trary to the law of nature. But that, it 
it seems to me, is exactly what it is not. 
Prayer contrary to the laws of nature ? 
What nature ? Whose nature? It is not 
contrary to my nature. It is not contrary 
to your nature. It is not contrary to human 
nature in general, for in all ages men have 
prayed; and, judging the future by the 
past, as long as human nature remains 
human nature they will continue to pray. 
It is the one thing, indeed, which every- 
where we see, which everywhere we hear, 
— prayer : in all lands, among all peoples, 
in all conditions of life, among all sorts of 
men, in all the past we hear it. In the 
song of the Parsee priest on the top of the 
Persian mountains ; in the sound of 
the Mussulman's cry, breaking forth with 
the sunrise from the turret stone of the 
mosque ; in Mohammedanism ; in Buddh- 
ism ; in Zoroasterism ; in the monotheism 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 253 

of the Jew ; in the militarism of the Roman ; 
in the f etichism of the African, — the voice 
of prayer is heard. And the spirit of prayer 
is felt breathing through the hymns to 
Indra and Varuna, as well as through the 
Psalms of David to Jehovah. 

What is the story of human life in the 
past but the story of religion? and if of 
religion, then of prayer. It is the story of 
human life trying to come to itself through 
a power outside of itself ; and to somehow 
tell itself, its deepest, inmost, secretest self, 
into the listening ear of some sympathetic 
God. And not only in the story of the past 
do we hear it, in the story of the present 
we hear it. The voice of prayer is heard 
in all the lands to-day ; among all the peo- 
ple to-day ; not only among the people who 
call themselves religious, but among the 
people avIio do not call themselves reli- 
gious, who yet, in spite of themselves, are a 
little religious at times. They cannot keep 
God out of their thought. They cannot keep 
God out of their speech. The instinct of 
God is in them, and they cannot get rid of it. 
And that instinct of God which is in them 
carries with it the instinct to appeal at 
times to God. And they do appeal to God ; 



254 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

not always reverently, sometimes profanely, 
using His name as a name with which to 
cnrse and swear. But what is cursing and 
swearing but the instinct in them of prayer, 
of appeal to God, gone mad, because they 
have gone mad and angry for a moment; 
the instinct in them of prayer blasphe- 
mously expressed. It is an irrepressible, 
an ineradicable instinct. It shows itself in 
wrath, in anger, in love, in fear, in danger, 
in death, in the sudden escape from dan- 
ger, in the sudden exemption from death, 
when involuntarily they are moved to say 
and can't help saying, " Thank God ! " as 
though, somehow, He did it, and they feel 
and know He did it. Or, when touched 
with some emotion, some deep and strong 
emotion beyond the common want, of glad- 
ness or of joy, which they know not how 
to express or how to others to tell it, or 
how with others to share it, the heart goes 
up to God as though it would share it with 
Him, and would say to Him, " Oh, see, as 
no one else can see, my gladness and my 
joy ! " Or when in some hour of need, 
confronting some difficult or perilous 
task which they have not strength or 
energy to perform, and yet which they 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 255 

must perform, without any human guid- 
ance and without any human aid, treading 
the winepress all alone in darkness and in 
weariness, with none to help or understand, 
or bring deliverance to them, and the cry 
goes up to God for help, and the appeal to 
God is made ! 

Prayer contrary to the laws of nature? 
Why it is a law of nature, of human na- 
ture at least, which lives, and breathes, 
and moves, and has its being in prayer; 
which is forever, reverently or irreverently, 
sacredly or profanely, silently or vocally, 
somehow appealing to God ; swearing in 
His name, protesting in His name, testify- 
ing in His name, deprecating, imprecating, 
expostulating in His name ; forever carry- 
ing up its great case in equity to God as 
unto its highest and ultimate Court. 

Contrary to the laws of nature ? Why, 
more than anything else it is our nature. 
It ripples through all our laughter, which 
is in its last analysis but the breaking forth 
for a moment of the imprisoned spirit try- 
ing to reach and touch the glad surprise of 
some unknown life. It ripples through all 
our laughter, it shines through all our 
tears : it shows itself in our weaknesses, 



256 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

makes stronger our strengths, and quickens 
within us the dream of some ideal life, not 
seen as yet, but believed in, towards which 
we now press on, towards which we now 
aspire as the home of the soul in God. In 
human nature, at least, I say, there is no 
other law so imperiously dominant, so su- 
premely transcendent, so universally preva- 
lent as the instinct in us of prayer; and 
we can no more get rid of it than human 
nature can get rid of human nature. 

Now let us go on a little farther. What 
is human nature? What is our physical 
science to-day declaring our human nature 
to be? Where does our physical science 
to-day say it originated and came from? 
You know what it has to say upon that point. 
Human nature, it says, is all of a piece and 
one with all the rest of nature : one organ- 
ism, one growth, one development ; just as 
the growth of the plant is one, from the 
seed where it starts to the blossom where 
it ends; as the growth of the tree is one, 
from the root below the ground to the fruit- 
age and foliage above. So is nature all of 
a piece, and one ; from the nature far down 
and below, which is not human, to the na- 
ture far up and above, which is human. It 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 257 

is all one growth, through protoplasm, and 
molecule, and mist, and star-dust, and rock, 
and mineral, and vegetable, to man; one 
growth, one organism, one development, all 
of a piece. Now, without entering upon a 
discussion of the merits of that theory, let 
us assume, if you please, that it is true, 
that man has been evolved by a long process 
of development out of a molecule, or a pro- 
toplasm, or a lump of clay. Will it be 
maintained, can it be maintained, that the 
lump of clay out of which he came, enters 
more essentially with its laws and tenden- 
cies into the constitution of things, than the 
human being with his laws and tendencies 
who came out of the lump? "Is that 
a consistent science which maintains that 
man is to be included within the scope of 
nature, and then excludes him from the 
scope of nature in trying to ascertain what 
are the laws of nature ? " If man be part of 
it all, connected with it all, related to it all, 
then why should he, the highest, biggest, 
best part, in trying to interpret nature, be 
thrown out of the count ? And if the ten- 
dency to pray be, as from the induction of 
all human life it seems to be, an essential 
part of his being, an essential law of his 
17 



258 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

being, why is it not just as much a law of 
nature, as the law which binds the planets 
in their course, or makes the earth to turn 
to-day, or the sun to shine to-day ? 

" The reality of a growing thing," some 
one has wisely and truly said, " the reality 
of a growing thing is in its highest form 
of growth ; " the last explains the first, not 
the first the last. And the highest form 
of growth in this growing universe, if it 
is a growing universe, is man, with the 
spiritual instinct in his heart to pray. 

But then it is said that that spiritual 
instinct of prayer must be confined to 
spiritual things. Possibly so. But who 
has a metaphysical scalpel or blade that 
is sharp enough and keen enough to draw 
the line of demarcation between them, and 
tell us where spirit in its influence on 
matter ends, and matter in its influence on 
spirit begins ? It cannot be done. Spirit- 
ual things and material things cannot be 
separated. They move and go together; 
here and now, at least, they stand or fall to- 
gether. Patience is a spiritual thing, as are 
love, hope, faith ; but they rest on a physi- 
cal basis, and are largely determined by 
physical facts and conditions. Good temper 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 259 

is a spiritual thing; but good temper is 
somewhat determined by good digestion. 
The soft answer that turneth away wrath is 
a spiritual thing ; but the soft answer that 
turneth away wrath is not so easily spoken 
when we are weak and tired, and the nerve 
force is exhausted, and all the nerves seem 
to be out on the surface scintillating 
sparks, as when we are strong and well. 
Spiritual forces are closely correlated with 
physical forces. If we are to pray only 
for spiritual things, how shall we know 
what to pray for and what not to pray 
for ? If we are to pray only for spiritual 
things and not physical, wdiich are so 
mixed up with them, how can we pray at 
all ? And yet is it not, after all, futile to 
pray for physical things? A shower of 
rain, for instance, is the product of certain 
atmospheric agencies, which make a shower 
of rain inevitable. Or the death of an in- 
dividual, again, is the consequence of 
certain pathological and physiological con- 
ditions which render his decease as sure 
as the rising or setting of the sun. And 
can we hope by prayer to change the whole 
course and constitution of the world 
of physical nature? I do not know; all 



260 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

I know is this, and this I do know, that 
it would be to change the whole course 
and constitution of the world of human 
nature if we did not pray. And upon that 
world of human nature, which is said to 
have come out of all the rest of nature, to 
be its blossomed outgrowth, — upon that 
world of human nature, with the instinct 
in it of prayer, we take our stand and 
pray, and leave results to Him who is 
greater and wiser than we, and who has 
made it a law of our being, a law of nature, 
to pray. 

Now, I have said all this, young gentle- 
men, because I want you to feel how right, 
how reasonable, is prayer; and that you 
are not turning away from the light of 
nature as modern knowledge reveals it to 
you when you turn towards the light of 
Christ. And because, further, I would 
deepen in you the conviction which I am 
sure you already have, that it is only by 
the opening up of your heart and soul, not 
only towards the human, but towards the 
divine environment of your lives, that you 
can reach the full stature of your personal 
development and make the most of your- 
selves. Let God make you strong, and 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 261 

then you are strong with a strength that 
will prove itself so often to be an invincible 
strength, and which opposition and diffi- 
culty will only more fully bring out. Do 
you remember the story that Browning 
tells of the tyrant who tried to crush one 
of his weak and apparently defenceless 
subjects ? 

" So I soberly laid my last plan 
To extinguish the man. 
Round his creep-hole with never a break 
Ran my fires for his sake. 
Overhead did my thunders combine 
With my underground mine, 
Till I looked from my labors content 
To enjoy the event, 
When suddenly, how think ye the end? 

The man sprang to his feet, 

Stood erect, caught at God's skirts and prayed, 

So I was afraid." 

Ah, yes, it is then that the man springs 
to his feet and stands erect and strong in 
the full stature of his manhood, when 
prayer becomes, not merely a form or phrase, 
but a living reality to him, and when, 
through prayer, he reaches out and touches 
the skirts of God, and God becomes a 
living reality to him. 



262 THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE 

How, then, in trying to tell you some- 
thing about the preparation of yourselves 
for that great work to which you have 
devoted yourselves could I dare, even at 
the risk of seeming to preach to you a 
little, leave unsaid that which I have said, 
and which, although I have said it last, is 
in importance first ? Never let your work 
come between you and God. You will be 
tempted to do so at times ; but do not yield 
to the temptation. Let nothing come be- 
tween you and God ; for it is as men of 
God that you go. Men of God ! Think 
how much that means, or how much it 
ought to mean. It is as men of God that 
you go out into the world among your 
fellow-men, with fixed and steadfast pur- 
pose to serve your fellow-men. Thus, and 
only thus, laying hold on God, will you 
become in a measure the incarnation of 
God, His quickening power and life flow- 
ing into your souls. Thus, and only thus, 
with a fixed and steadfast purpose to serve 
your fellow-men, will you become the 
embodiment of your fellow-men, and what 
is highest and best in them will be ex- 
pressed in you. And becoming thus in 
yourselves the most that you can become, 



MAKING THE MOST OF HIMSELF 263 

and having a personality strengthened and 
enriched both by man and God, by the 
whole environment of your lives, the human 
and the divine, will you most effectively 
do what He, who was on earth both Son 
of Man and God, has sent you forth to 
do. 



THE END. 



ki 



